Oil companies are hugely capital intensive and they have enormous discretion to defer most of those investments indefinitely.
By redirecting capital to projects like the Permian, which generate large profits at very low oil prices, free cash rises.
Costly endeavors like off-shore drilling or Arctic drilling projects have a break-even and payoff far too many years down the road, so everyone in the industry has dropped those plans until supply and demand come back into balance at a level which supports those projects.
I worked on projects where the last writing in the project files had been 55 years earlier, and I "temporarily" shut-down other projects which might not be reopened for a similar period of time.
I've never worked in any other business which felt so timeless and without much pressure to make unprofitable business "work". Assets and people were mostly redeployed elsewhere.
We've run out of other people's Social Security taxes needed to subsidize our low income tax rates.
