The CMS Oil and Gas Dis­putes Sur­vey ex­amined the key drivers of dis­putes and dis­pute man­age­ment in the oil and gas in­dustry, and how sec­tor par­ti­cipants are mov­ing to­wards new ap­proaches to min­im­ise con­flicts and dis­putes. Based on more than 50 re­sponses from seni­or leg­al man­agers and seni­or in-house coun­sel in the oil and gas in­dustry across Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pa­cific, Africa and Lat­in Amer­ica, it provides in­ter­est­ing in­sights in­to how dis­putes arise and are man­aged around the globe.Even be­fore the on­set of the COV­ID-19 pan­dem­ic, the oil and gas in­dustry was fa­cing con­sid­er­able chal­lenges, not least a pro­longed peri­od of re­l­at­ively low oil prices and a glob­al fo­cus on lower­ing car­bon emis­sions and “green” en­ergy.Com­pared with the heights of 2008, pri­or to the glob­al fin­an­cial crisis, when in­ter­na­tion­al oil prices peaked at over US$140 a bar­rel, the US$55 bar­rel price for Brent Crude in late Janu­ary 2021 still looked re­l­at­ively low, des­pite the re­cent par­tial re­cov­ery. Those weak prices con­tin­ue to place con­sid­er­able pres­sures on in­dustry play­ers that are now of­ten op­er­at­ing on his­tor­ic­ally low mar­gins of prof­it­ab­il­ity.It was not al­ways this way. As ver­tic­ally in­teg­rated gi­ants, oil and gas ma­jors were tra­di­tion­ally con­sidered well able to ab­sorb down­sides with­in a broad port­fo­lio of rev­en­ues and part­ner­ships, but today many in­dustry play­ers no longer have that lux­ury. A num­ber of geo­graph­ic mar­kets that were pre­vi­ously dom­in­ated by a few large up­stream oil com­pan­ies have transitioned through di­vest­ments to own­er­ship by a lar­ger group of smal­ler in­de­pend­ent play­ers with more fo­cused port­fo­li­os and a range of fin­an­cial mod­els. With more op­er­at­ors and par­ti­cipants in many oil and gas geo­graph­ic mar­kets, it seems likely that the op­por­tun­it­ies for dis­putes are in­creas­ing. CMS Oil and Gas Dis­putes Sur­vey in­dic­ates that more could be done to pre­vent and mit­ig­ate against ex­pens­ive time-con­sum­ing dis­putes.

Wel­come to the CMS Oil and Gas 2020 An­nu­al Re­view pod­cast and video series. In this series we dis­cuss the latest de­vel­op­ments in Eng­lish Oil and Gas law and what it means for the in­dustry. Top­ics in­clude:Joint...

Wel­come to the winter edi­tion of the CMS In­ter­na­tion­al Dis­putes Di­gest, the bi­an­nu­al pub­lic­a­tion of CMS’ Dis­pute Res­ol­u­tion prac­tice fea­tur­ing ana­lys­is and com­ment­ary on the ma­jor trends shap­ing the...

Wel­come to the 2020 edi­tion of the CMS An­nu­al Re­view of de­vel­op­ments in Eng­lish oil and gas law, fea­tur­ing com­ment­ary and ana­lys­is on the latest de­vel­op­ments in Eng­lish oil and gas law. This year’s...