Meet the shrewdest operators in today’s oil markets

Almost a decadeOPECOPECOPEC ago, a price war broke out between in the Persian Gulf and the in America, whose innovative drilling techniques gave rise to the shale revolution. In December 2014 of both antagonists standing back to back, frowns on their faces and petrol pumps at the ready. It called the new economics of oil “Sheikhs v shale”. Missing from that picture were two companies that until then had been the biggest stalwarts of America’s oil industry, ExxonMobil and Chevron. Had they been pictured, the two crusty supermajors would probably be standing awkwardly on the sidelines, struggling to make sense of what was going on. At last, they are moving back to centre stage. For much of the interim period the petrostates and the hardscrabble shale producers remained critical to the new oil order, though their tussle unfolded in strange ways. In 2016 the producers’ cartel joined forces with Russia to create +, which its autocratic masterminds hoped would let them control oil prices in order to benefit their regimes. Yet instead of responding by dousing the world in oil, the frackers unexpectedly developed -like self-restraint. Under pressure from investors to improve profits, they kept a tight rein on drilling activity even when crude surged above $100 a barrel.