Brilliant but famously headstrong, Raymond set the tone for Exxon Mobil’s attitude toward climate change and alternative energy, and its all-encompassing embrace of fossil fuels. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, he ran Exxon’s nuclear and renewable-energy units—relatively small enterprises within the company’s universe—and then dumped the businesses when oil prices fell again. For years, the last remnant of Exxon’s renewable-energy portfolio was an early-generation solar unit on the roof of its Universe of Energy pavilion at Epcot Theme Park in Walt Disney World.

Housed in a large hexagonal building near Epcot’s signature golf-ball-shaped Spaceship Earth attraction, the Universe of Energy showed a short film and animatronic scenes celebrating energy in all its beneficence, with nary a smokestack or Middle Eastern army in sight. “En-er-gy, you make the world go round” went the theme song’s refrain. Visitors traveled through the exhibit’s auditoriums and dinosaur displays in sections of theater seating that served as small vehicles for the journey; at the end, the sections would reassemble to form a complete theater. The wizardry was hugely popular in its time, even if the solar panels on the roof, which purportedly helped power the ride, were a prop. “They were mostly for show,” says a former Exxon Mobil official familiar with the project. “They provided very little juice.” (Disney maintains that the panels provided as much power as its promotional materials claimed.)

Veterans of other oil companies say they’ve actually endured scorn from senior Exxon Mobil executives over the years for talking up renewables. In 2007, when ConocoPhillips helped found the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a business lobby supporting controls on greenhouse-gas emissions, Exxon Mobil executives “were furious at us,” says one senior ConocoPhillips official. BP, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips have all diversified into renewables to varying degrees. BP is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of photovoltaic cells. Shell is a major wind-power producer. Chevron has substantial geothermal operations, and ConocoPhillips is investing heavily in biofuels, including diesel made from animal waste. That leaves Exxon Mobil as the last significant holdout for a future staked almost entirely on oil and gas.

The problem for the company and the industry it leads is that no one knows where the new hydrocarbons will come from. The most accessible petroleum deposits—in places like Alaska, Texas, Mexico, and the North Sea—are in mature fields that are in steady decline. New discoveries in these regions are possible, but they generally lie deeper or in more remote areas and will require expensive drilling technology to become productive. And, as the stalemate in Alaska shows, even knowing that the energy is available doesn’t mean the pipeline will be built to get it to market. (See “Pipe Dreams”) The upshot: Exxon Mobil’s production volume is dwindling. Its output of oil and natural gas plummeted 6 percent in 2008, with declines reported in the first three quarters. The drop reflected production dips at several North American fields, partly as a result of hurricanes, as well as Venezuela’s expropriation of certain Exxon Mobil operations. The company was also hit by shrinking draws from joint-production projects around the world. Under the terms of such contracts, which account for about 20 percent of Exxon Mobil’s production, higher oil prices translated into fewer barrels allocated to Exxon Mobil. That’s because the contracts are structured so that Exxon Mobil recoups its initial investment rapidly and then receives profits more gradually. In other words, ironic as it seems, high oil prices actually eroded Exxon Mobil’s medium- to long-term value, analysts say. Hence the company’s sunken stock price, even before the market crash, despite the record profit.

Yet Tillerson keeps upping the ante on oil and gas. Last year, he boosted Exxon Mobil’s exploration and development budget by 25 percent, to $125 billion over the next five years. The company’s sole public commitment to alternative-energy research is a 10-year, $100 million grant to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. And it turns out that only 40 percent of that money will fund renewable-­energy work. (Nearly 30 percent of the funds are going into tinkering with fossil fuels.) Tillerson is spending considerably more money trying to rebrand Exxon Mobil as a technology company, albeit one focused on better ways to pull oil and gas out of the ground.

Though several TV and print ads feature what the company’s website calls its “revolutionary” separator “breakthrough” for hybrid- and electric-car batteries, these emphasize the company’s technological advancements, not any commitment to an alternative-energy future.

The image dovetails with one of senior management’s periodic big-think reviews. A few years ago, top executives made a thorough review of Exxon’s energy outlook from 1975. Company forecasters had nailed the demand side in their 30-year forecast; energy consumption, as they predicted, closely tracked global economic growth. But they had wildly overestimated the speed at which prices would rise. The reason: “We missed the growth of technology,” says an executive who participated in the review. “We missed how rigs would go from 50 feet of water to 5,000 feet”—enabling drillers to capture more oil at lower depths—“how horizontal drilling would require fewer offshore platforms, and how the cost of finding oil would fall.”

Roughly two-thirds of Exxon Mobil’s reserves are made up of conventional oil, gas, and liquid natural-gas projects. However, Exxon Mobil’s future resource base—what experts call the opportunity pipeline—is much more tenuous. These undeveloped deposits amount to the equivalent of about 50 billion barrels. Exxon Mobil owns the rights to these but doesn’t plan to exploit them for another five to 10 years. Conventional oil and natural-gas fields make up a mere quarter of that total.