One casualty of the oil price downturn could be the megaproject. For years, as conventional oil reserves depleted and became increasingly hard to find, oil companies ventured into far-flung locales to find new sources of production. Extracting oil from these frontier areas required more advanced technology and a lot more capital: Ultra deepwater, Arctic offshore, heavy oil sands, and increasingly, the Lower Tertiary. Often these megaprojects projects were only the purview of the largest oil companies, as smaller players did not have the resources – financial or technological – to make them work. Meanwhile, smaller drillers, at least in North America, turned to shale, which required less upfront cash and could be turned around on a quick timetable. The collapse of oil prices, however, could kill off the megaproject. The oil majors are scrambling to cut costs, and large-scale projects with high costs and long time-horizons are not making […]