The Energy Intelligence Top 100:Ranking the World's Oil Companies is out and it appears that Asia is fast becoming the center of the oil universe. As Asia's government-controlled national oil companies (NOCs) continue to add capacity, Asia's growing demand for oil and natural gas is helping these companies to expand in size and influence. The list incorporates the Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW) Top 50, and the break is 40/60 with NOCs accounting for 41 of this year's top oil companies with international oil companies (IOCs) comprising 59 of the companies on the list. Honorable mentions include Malaysia-based Petronas (at No. 17), China's CNOOC (No. 38), and Thailand's PTT (No. 53). Energy Intelligence claims these to be the fastest rising companies in recent years. Landing at No. 77, Korea-based KNOC made it back to the list following its acquisition of Canadian assets. India's Reliance Industries jumped 26 spots to land at No. 40 due to the company's significant increasees in both gas production and distillation capacity. Energy Intelligence ranks these companies on operating metrics by the sum of ordinal ranks in six operational categories: oil production, gas production, oil reserves, gas reserves, product sales, and refinery distillation capacity. This is in addition to more than 100 other financial, upstream, refining, and marketing categories. The Top 100 control 87% of the world's oil reserves and 72% of its gas reserves. According to editor and senior reaserch analyst Ian Nathan, "While the names at the top of the list barely shift, looking deeper will show that most of these companies in this group are in the midst of important changes, which could actually push them down, not up, in the next few years." The most prominent example of a shrinking giant is BP, which faces huge costs associated with the Deepwater Horizon incident. The 2011 rankings show that IOCs as a group might be rethinking size and mergers as a growth strategy. In 2009, an expected consolidation wave never materialized, however numbers show that, compared to 1997, the six largest IOCs contribute a smaller share of global oil and gas operations than their aggregated predecessors. At the time, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) might have made strategic sense, but operational size now is being rethought as a driver of value creation. According to the report, this is a significant break from the past. For the 2011 Top 100, 48 companies from 1997's Top 100 have disappeared from the rankings due almost entirely to M&A. For an in depth look at other salient points drawn from Energy Intelligence's current Rankings or to find out how to access the full report, visit http://www.energyintel.com/PublicationDetail.asp?publication_id=130