The oil market collapse, which has claimed thousands of Houston jobs and devastated the city's petroleum industry, is practically a comfort zone for Exxon Mobil Corp.
So far, the giant oil company based in the Dallas suburb of Irving has escaped the worst of the downturn, watching from behind a fortress of cash as its rivals scrap major drilling projects and cut deep into budgets and payrolls.
But it isn't corporate voodoo that has kept Exxon Mobil levitating above all of that. The company's structure and culture help it ride out price busts, which almost always follow times of plenty in the global oil market.
Among its largest rivals, Exxon Mobil makes the most money and produces the most oil for every dollar it spends, and it puts out the biggest bounty of oil and natural gas -- both in absolute terms, and for every worker it employs.
Even in good years, its senior managers are required to cut costs out of the business, and it gets more from its expensive projects than all of its Big Oil competitors.
And that's made Exxon Mobil stand out since the summer of 2014, when U.S. crude began falling from more than $100 a barrel to $44.29 a barrel as of Friday, and sent much of the industry into near-crisis.
The company has avoided mass layoffs, even as its rivals Chevron, Shell and BP plan to cut a combined 18,500 jobs this year.
Despite its resilience, it could soon face trouble on a different front. New York's attorney general last week launched an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil covered up research it had funded that predicted the dangers of climate change decades ago. Exxon Mobil denies such allegations.
The company has cut its budget by a few billion dollars, but relative to its size, it has taken a scalpel where others have swung an ax, finding more to cut from operational costs than capital spending.
"More than any other company, they understand the energy business is a long-cycle business," said Dennis Cassidy, a managing partner at Alix Partners.
Exxon Mobil's more conservative strategy -- the company is never the first to chase the industry's latest gee-whiz idea -- has helped keep it focused on bringing large projects into production without running over budget, Cassidy said.
The company's slow, deliberate way of expanding its business is part of the company's genetic code, dating back to the days of Standard Oil, its 19th century corporate ancestor. Founder John D. Rockefeller made his way to the wild and woolly oil patch by stretching out from his refining empire.
Refining is a closely controlled business, driven by margins and nothing like the high-stakes Texas wildcatting later practiced by H.L. Hunt and others. Now, the U.S. oil patch is populated by hundreds of Hunts and one Rockefeller.
The latest oil price-crash could be a chance for Exxon Mobil -- which declined comment for this story -- to show Wall Street how its business model isn't as ancient or outmoded as critics claim. Exxon Mobil's share price has slid 18 percent since crude prices peaked last year -- not nearly as far as Chevron, Shell and BP shares have fallen. And unlike the vast majority in the oil patch, Exxon Mobil this year raised its dividend and continued to buy back shares, albeit much at a much-reduced rate.
In terms of stock market value, Exxon Mobil's strategy of constantly fine-tuning the efficiency of its operations had dominated the oil industry in the decades before 2000, when crude prices tended to be flatter and lower than in recent years.
In the last decade, economic growth and oil demand in emerging markets, along with crude prices, began surging, prompting Wall Street to reward growth in crude production and reserves more than cost management.
If an investor had bought shares in Big Oil stocks in 1972 and reinvested dividends until selling them off in 2001, returns from Exxon Mobil would be nearly double the returns from Chevron, the second-best performer.
But if the investor bought the shares in 2001, reinvested dividends and sold them in 2012, returns from Chevron and ConocoPhillips would have beaten Exxon Mobil, with Royal Dutch Shell and France's Total close on Exxon Mobil's tail.
Its Big Oil rivals -- the handful of other publicly traded international oil companies that take the product from the well to retail sales -- in recent years have caught up to the lumbering oil giant by increasing reserves and production quickly.
"Exxon's cost-management emphasis didn't translate very well into aggressively growing reserves," said Praveen Kumar, a finance professor at the University of Houston.
And the company's slow pace has led to missteps in the past. For years, Exxon Mobil hesitated in entering surging U.S. shale gas plays, until it swooped in mid-2010, closing its $31 billion purchase of Houston shale gas driller XTO Energy. Over the next two years, U.S. natural gas prices collapsed as a domestic supply glut set it.
But the market's preference for cost-conscious management is likely to return again.
"Now we're in an environment where discipline will start to get rewarded," Kumar said.
Oil prices began falling last year under the weight of a global oversupply, and this summer, China and other emerging markets began showing signs that global economic growth, a key driver of oil prices, may slow next year and beyond.
Growth in China and India surged from less than 4 percent in 2001 to more than 8 percent in 2007, before edging down in the years after the financial crisis. Now, the Swiss financial institution UBS expects GDP growth in those markets to taper back to about 4 percent this year and next year.
Emerging markets are "entering a new and dangerous phase," UBS analysts said in a recent report, noting that some emerging-markets government balance sheets "are eroding fast."
It's an environment Exxon Mobil knows well. Beginning in the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya, Iran and others nationalized their oil industries, barring access by the Western oil companies to the Middle Eastern fields where they made big fortunes.
That made new oil and gas deposits harder and costlier to find, so the company that paid most attention to costs won favor with investors.
The dynamic changed in the last decade as oil prices rose and Wall Street rewarded growth.
"Exxon has had plenty of mega-projects, but relative to its total size, it didn't have as huge a project slate over the last five years," said Lysle Brinker, director of upstream equity research at IHS. That meant Chevron and other more aggressive companies could grow faster.
Even when oil was $100 a barrel, Exxon Mobil avoided overreaching and continued managing costs.
From 2009 to 2013, Exxon Mobil collected on average 22.7 percent in returns on the capital it spent on upstream projects, higher than Chevron's 15 percent, Shell's 10 percent and ConocoPhillips' 9 percent.
Last year, when crude prices were in a free-fall, Exxon Mobil's upstream project returns came in lower at 15 percent -- but still well above its peers, according to Barclays.
For Big Oil, surviving the downturn will take discipline, and "relentlessly driving out costs and improving bottom-line performance," said Bob Peterson, a consultant at Oliver Wyman.
"It's about the core competency of planning, delivering and starting up projects on or before schedule or on or under budget," he said.
Exxon Mobil produced 3.97 million barrels of oil equivalent a day last year, about 12 percent lower than its peak output in 2011. But among the five largest oil majors, it had the leanest workforce for every barrel it produced, putting out 53 barrels a day for each employee it had in 2014. In recent years, Exxon Mobil has slowly trimmed its workforce to 1999 levels.
Earlier this year, one of Exxon Mobil's offshore projects in Nigeria produced its first barrels of oil five months ahead of schedule and $400 million under budget. A large expansion at the company's $9 billion Kearl oil sands mine in Alberta began a month earlier than expected and didn't go over budget - although that region also presents some difficulties.
Meanwhile, Shell in recent years has spent -- and lost -- billions trying to remake itself into a U.S. shale player, an Arctic driller and, this year, one of the world's largest liquefied natural gas suppliers with the $70 billion buyout of BG Group.
That deal has come under scrutiny from analysts and investors as the LNG market seems poised to suffer from the same global glut other energy sources have.
Still, Exxon Mobil is exposed to the oil bust. Its profit fell 47 percent in the third quarter. And it has some weak spots.
Of all the super majors, Exxon Mobil has the largest footprint in the Canadian oil sands, where the cost of producing a barrel of crude is among the world's highest.
"Even though Exxon's portfolio may be the most bulletproof of its peers, it still has challenges," Brinker said.