Here’s a case that lights up Exxon’s strategy of reaping all the profit it can, while balking at actually developing new U.S. oil and natural gas resources. Exxon and a few partners recently lost their lease on a huge Alaskan natural gas field that it held since 1977 and failed to develop. Now Exxon is suing the state over the leases, and demanding to build an ice road into the gas field, on the basis that it now might actually drill. Unsurprisingly, Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources doesn’t believe it.