Oil and Gas Outlook 2021: Healing, But Wary

How it started: Out-of-control global pandemic, Saudi-Russia price war, epic economic collapse, crude price plunge to -$37/bbl, massive layoffs.

How it’s going: Better, but the oil and gas industry will be nursing wounds well into 2021.

“We have been characterizing the oil market at this point going forward as recovering but not recovered,” Mark Finley, fellow at the Center for Energy Studies of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told Hart Energy. Oil remains in the process of coming back from an unprecedented drop in demand, he said, much of it stemming from a near-complete cessation of travel in the late first quarter and early second quarter.

“While [demand is] significantly higher now than it was then, it’s not all the way back nor will it be, most likely, at any point in 2021,” Finley said.