CIR Editorial

Every Friday afternoon, Baker Hughes releases its weekly U.S. rig count — one of the most-watched data series in the oil and gas industry. The number of active drilling rigs is an imperfect but real-time proxy for operator confidence, capital deployment pace, and the near-term production trajectory of U.S.

Every time a tanker is attacked in the Red Sea, a pipeline is sabotaged in Iraq, or tensions escalate in the Persian Gulf, oil markets face the same question: how much is enough? How large a risk premium should be embedded in crude prices to account for geopolitical disruption risk

Private equity's relationship with oil and gas upstream has never been more complicated. The wave of consolidation that swept the industry in 2023–2024 — culminating in ExxonMobil's $60 billion Pioneer acquisition and Diamondback's $26 billion Endeavor deal — was in large part a story about