How many oil companies are there in the world?
That depends upon your definition of an “oil company”. There are companies in the US which sale gasoline, diesel, and lubricating oil but call themselves names like “Smith Oil Company” yet they produce nothing and refine nothing. Thus there are literally thousands of “oil companies” in the world both those which produce & refine oil plus those who distribute products. The types of oil companies vary from large oil producing & refining companies such as ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, & Chevron to very large Government-owned national oil companies such as Saudi Aramco, Kuwait Petroleum Corp., Pemex, Petrobras, Sinopec, CNOOC, etc. Then you have hundreds of mid-sized companies most of which produce oil & natural gas but don’t refine products. You also have thousands of smaller sized companies even those privately owned which produce oil & natural gas.
