Written by Michael Vrtis President of Realgy Energy Services in response to the Economist article The global oil industry: Supermajordammerung

The energy industry includes some of the largest companies and business entities in the world. Energy is by far the largest traded entity in the world (probably next to money!).

Realgy Energy Services represents a small piece in that picture but we witness the changes in the industry. In reading the following article the comparison between what goes on at the largest part of the energy industry is also apparent below.

Consider the following:

The major oil companies purposely outsourced technical expertise to service companies.

Countries with oil and gas resources had new found leverage against the majors; the ability to hire technical services were met with ready available financial resources (internal or external). The result; the majors were pushed out of some of the most developable oil fields in the world.

So the majors have to look elsewhere to keep their business operating. Which means they explore and develop in ever more remote locations (deep water gulf).

Analogous is States wanting to reduce the cost of energy for their residences/business (think of them as the countries). The utilities are the majors. So when regulators/States sought leverage over the utilities to lower costs; the creation of customer choice programs enabled the technical ability that existed in the marketplace (energy traders and schedulers) to directly serve consumers at a scale that allowed the energy marketers’ businesses to grow and flourish.

In both cases the consumer of energy has benefited from lower cost energy.

Check out The Economist article: The global oil industry: Supermajordammerung