Whoever wrote this seems to be predicting the present while having no awareness of how the petroleum industry works. Yes, they've outlined what most majors are doing to different degrees in different areas. However, you're stupid not to keep your ability to operate when oil prices come back up. (Caveat: I'm an exploration geologist at a "western major", so I do have a somewhat slanted view.)

First off, let's get something out of the way. The current price environment is every bit as artificially low as $120/bbl oil was artificially high. Saudi Arabia is deliberately producing at very high rates to keep their market share and drive companies that can't operate at $40/bbl out of business. They want to be able to maintain their control over global oil markets in the future, and they're in a geologically unique position of having huge reserves that can be produced at high rates and are economic at very low oil prices. Therefore, they've flexed their muscles with the knowledge that unconventionals can't keep up.

Most majors are operating on the assumption that oil will be back in the ~$60/bbl range within two years.

This is reasonable for several reasons.

1) Unconventional oil production _will_ decrease significantly over the next year. Unconventional wells have very rapid decline rates.

2) It's not clear that Iran's production coming onto the global markets can offset the decline in unconventional production. Iran has huge reserves in what should be a relatively cheap operating environment, they they also have aging infrastructure.

3) Saudi Arabia is likely to drop production once US unconventional-focused companies are no longer a threat.

Next, yes, they've outlined a strategy that all of the majors are following, albeit to less of an extreme. To be precise:

> For Western oil companies, the rational strategy will be to stop oil exploration and seek profits by providing equipment, geological knowhow, and new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to oil-producing countries. But their ultimate goal should be to sell their existing oil reserves as quickly as possible and distribute the resulting tsunami of cash to their shareholders until all of their low-cost oilfields run dry.

The first half is exactly what every major, non-national upstream oil company does. We provide the know-how to 1) find, 2) develop infrastructure to produce, and 3) efficiently recover hydrocarbons to countries who don't have a national oil company with the know-how or capital to do it on their own.

Next, most of the equipment and services portion of that isn't provided, developed, or controlled by oil companies. It's done by service companies (e.g. Halliburton, Schlumberger, etc). The in-house knowledge oil companies have is mostly around geology and managing huge infrastructure projects. (I'm biased towards exploration and I'm dramatically oversimplifying there.)

Finally, yes, most companies are selling a lot of assets right now. However, you only sell what you don't think you can operate economically in the current price environment. You're typically selling it to someone who can operate it more efficiently or who has a different idea of the potential for enhancing reserves. At any rate, finding a buyer for the stuff you'd want to sell most is difficult, and a lot of the rest is currently profitable.

"Wasting money by seeking new reserves" is just a silly statement. If we don't keep exploring, we'll wind up in the same boat we were back in the early 00's. It takes decades to go from exploration to first production. You cut back on major capital expenditures for exploration, but you don't stop entirely.