Exxon's Billion-Barrel Secret

The only thing that surprised the energy industry more than Exxon Mobil Corp.'s mammoth oil find in the Gulf of Mexico is that it kept its size quiet for so long.

The company is notoriously closemouthed. As spokesman Patrick McGinn put it Thursday, Exxon just doesn't "talk much"—even as it became known publicly this week that it discovered possibly one billion barrels of recoverable oil that it could lose it in a court battle with the government, the Wall St Journal reports.

Such discoveries tend to leak out. Dozens of company personnel usually know, and in this case there were perhaps dozens more from Exxon's ...

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