The offshore sector will increasingly focus on natural gas instead of oil over the next few decades, while policy support and technology improvements could also see offshore investment shift in favor of wind power. However, in the short run, offshore drilling is set for a resurgence. The oil market downturn in 2014 hit offshore drilling hard. Developing an oil field offshore is a huge, complex, expensive and long-term undertaking, a proposition that fell out of favor when oil prices crashed. By comparison, shale drilling is relatively cheap and short-term and over the last few years, capital flowed out of the offshore sector and into the shale patch. Even the oil majors pivoted towards small, short-cycle shale drilling. Today, a quarter of the world’s oil supply comes from offshore at about 26-27 mb/d, a figure that has remained steady over the past decade, which translates into a declining share of […]