Business

COVID-19 And Oil Price Catastrophes: How Can Industries Jointly Build Resilience?

What the oil and gas sector teaches us above all else is that the most important lessons are shaped by guiding principles, and if there is one guiding principle threaded throughout this industry’s history of confronting crises, it is this: we are all in it together.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY Agus Nugraha / Opn Images/ Barcroft Studios / Future Publishing (Photo credit should read Agus Nugraha / Opn Images/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

Leading industrialists often learn their trade in the school of hard knocks by forging a quality that is emblematic of doing business in the 21st century – resilience.

Nowhere is this more so than in the oil and gas industry, a sector with broad shoulders whose genetic code is hardwired with a capacity to take it on the chin.

It’s not difficult to find examples of how this sector has rebounded against the odds: the transformative crises of the 1970s, the price slumps of 1990 and 2008 – and, now, the near-simultaneous shocks of plummeting demand from the COVID-19 virus and crashing prices.

This sector’s global importance means these latest shocks are bad news for all of us, and recovery will not be easy.

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