GamechangerThe big game changer coming to oil industry is articial intelligence. Time will tell but saudi probably has underestimated the impact of artifical intelligence, feeding the USA super majors more profits is just going increase their capital investment in artifical intelligence.
One of the reasons microsoft, amazon, google and some of these tech companies are trading an such insane valuation levels is because major industries like oil and gas are investing their IT data and IT to cloud based services. Not many people understand this.
These cloud based service companies would have skyscrapers of servers..floor to floor. A company like Exxon would have floors of data centers from a cloud company.
Microsoft in some cases is housing the brains for super major oil companies AI.
This AI is going to interpret seismic data....much faster and accurate than humans and humans still will verify where AI says to drill.
So many ways AI will hit oil patch for the very large companies that can afford this tech and the right large scale play like a bakken or Permain or even Montny eventually.
AI is even going to be used for marketing and hedging.
That bakken play that Hess sold to chevron, AI will help wateflood production and recovering more barrels over long term.
Some of these super major oil companies are probably banking on AI unlocking even more value in their take overs like Chevrons and Exxons of the world.
As a country USA is in great shape in bad times just because they have microsoft and amazons that offer such massive cloud computing services...which is going to be backbone of any large company in western world.