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.