In any assessment of the oil price crash, it is worth remembering Shakespeare’s aphorism: “What’s past is prologue”. In 2015, it appeared that the salient features of the US oil industry were: falling costs and rising productivity, which meant total output fell only gently from its April peak; continued investor support for capital raising (at least in the first half of the year); sluggish merger and acquisition activity; and a sharp rise in bankruptcies (but only a few with debts above $2bn). This prompted talk about the resilience of US shale oil, with some justification. Fears — or hopes — that shale production would rapidly dry up have turned out to be misplaced. However, the effects of the fall in the oil price are still only beginning to work through. All we have seen so far is the prologue to what are likely to be more dramatic events in 2016. Last year’s shake-out in the industry was still relatively subdued. Now that oil prices have taken a further lurch downwards — with benchmark Brent crude hitting 11-year lows towards the end of 2015 — the financial pressure on oil producers is growing. At the same time, some of the defences that helped protect companies against the impact of lower oil and gas prices have been crumbling. Hedging positions put in place when prices were higher have been rolling off. And while Pioneer Natural Resources and a few other companies had hedged most of their oil production to protect this year’s revenues, many others — such as Continental Resources, EOG Resources and Apache — did not.