One thing Oil companies are very good at is Chemical Engineering, or the construction of large plants to deal with the production of basic raw materials and fuel from crude oil, and this would be a critical advantage in the future against smaller silicon valley funded startups.
It occurs to me that the biggest problem in adopting algae and similar methods for creating biofuel is in scaling production to a point where single factories can produce hundreds of thousands of barrels of bio-diesel or bio-gasolene per day, on a managable footprint of land. So if the Oil companies want to maintain their monopoly, and continue to leverage their stranglehold on distribution, this would seem to be a way to do it.
The issue they have is the same one Google faces with it's data centers, which is to find a cheap and plentiful source of energy (and water in the Oil companies' case). Once they have that, the problem that remains is how to build the worlds largest still, and how to dispose/reuse their waste.
Furthermore, it is critical to the future of the Oil companies that they both behave and are seen to behave as good corporate citizens. What they means in a practical sense is oil/gasolene price stability. $4/gallon isn't a problem per se, given that most of Europe pays twice that. It's that we went from $2/gallon to $4/gallon in under four years, and that price "shock" has been the disruptive factor.
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