Giant oil companies and dynamic capabilities approach: How much “peak oil” and “global warming” make them dynamic?

After a century of huge demand for products and inexpensive crude oil supply for the giant oil companies (Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, TOTAL), environment started become more and more challenging for them. Role of some factors are more and more critical in the future of oil industry as whole and these companies as well. The oil would not be that much cheap anymore and GHG emission has become the biggest question oil companies have to address. Also the increasing rate of fuel consumption worldwide is a motivation to develop the new technologies deploying alternative sources of energies. If the nightmare of “Peak Oil” in this decade be added to the problem, the situation would be super challenging for these big companies. So could it be the start of an alarm situation for these big companies, after about a century in convenience for them? What would be the strategy and path they would pick then. In this paper, strategies of these companies- referred as the Giants - towards mentioned challenges, in the past, present and future will be analyzed using the dynamic capability theory as the framework. Shell and Total seems to be more proactive in reconfiguring new capabilities and ExxonMobil and chevron see the environment less challenging and seems to be more conservative. PB has a position somewhere in the middle. The roots for such a strategic perspective will be briefly described.