21st Century Marketplace Vision - Our User Community - Part IX

Preamble

It is rapidly becoming standard that Enterprise Resource Planning providers must compete on demonstrable value. If they cannot produce a tangible revenue stream above and beyond their cost, they will become uncompetitive in the near term. Gartner stated on April 2, 2026, that by 2028 more than half of enterprises will stop paying for assistive intelligence tools such as copilots and smart advisors and will instead prefer platforms that commit to workflow results. The same Gartner release also projected that by 2030, software companies that merely add bolt-on Artificial Intelligence to legacy applications, rather than redesigning for agentic execution, could face margin compression of as much as 80 percent. (Gartner)

Every move within Synallagi has been made with enhanced producer profitability in mind. For decades, People, Ideas & Objects have worked to enter oil & gas on the strength of a value proposition substantial enough to justify adoption. We have organized our user community as the primary vehicle for creating, developing, and implementing that value. We have equipped our user community with the authority, responsibility, capabilities, and commercial purpose through a strong organizing charter. 
Nothing will be resolved in terms of remediating the damage to industry from producer officers and directors more than generating profitability. As the primary industry producer, oil & gas producers must be profitable, everywhere and always. Synallagi provides what's needed.

Our user community is motivated through a shared bonus structure that rewards creation and development in the areas of performance, innovation, profitability, accountability, and automation during software developments. It also includes team-based incentives tied to overall project completion, module completion, and other measures intended to reinforce collaboration and coordinated execution. At the individual level, incentives include project completion rewards, exclusive Intellectual Property license domains, ownership and operation of service provider organizations. This structure is intended to align commercial upside with the creation of measurable value.

The third paper in this 21st Century Marketplace series will address our user community’s service provider organizations and will introduce a different incentive architecture. That structure will be built around Synallagi’s Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration and automation’s architected, designed, and implemented through our user community. In that environment, people are progressively abstracted from the transaction layer of the marketplace, the producer firm, and the Joint Operating Committee. Their role shifts upward into the higher-order functions of accountability, assurance, supervision, and management.

By setting a new standard, individuals can attempt the process on a trial or part time basis and evaluate their knowledge and skills to assess their capabilities to operate within our user community and participate productively before having to fully commit. Initial prepackaged projects will be available for this purpose.

Service provider organizations (our user community) will participate in the value created for producers, Joint Operating Committees, and the marketplace. Across the industry, the aggregate yield from those benefits should be substantial, making the cost of sharing economically immaterial relative to industry’s gains produced. These benefit allocations will be governed through a targeting framework that measures value creation and records the compensation earned from it. That framework will allow both producers and our user communities to determine, in tangible terms, whether revenues and costs are being managed fairly and equitably. It will also provide an objective basis for reporting the overall performance of our user community over time, including the total benefits generated for producers, Joint Operating Committees, and marketplaces.

Our value proposition remains in the range of $25.7 trillion to $45.7 trillion over a twenty-five-year period. If value of that scale is available, why has it not already been pursued? The first reason is disintermediation. Officers and directors of producer firms are unwilling to proceed where doing so would disrupt their existing self-serving arrangement to correct what they already know is broken. People, Ideas & Objects have been unable to overcome this obstacle. 

In a recent X post on March 11, 2026, George Sivulka @gsivulka of @hebbia articulated a significant new perspective: "Productive Individuals Don’t Make Productive Firms." His commentary includes key observations such as:

Individual AI breeds chaos.

Institutional AI fosters coordination.

Contrary to the expectations of some producers—who believed we would open source the specification to limit the influence of People, Ideas & Objects—we have maintained control. We are confident they will appreciate the regulated environment that our user community can now provide under our Synallagi IP license. It is People, Ideas & Objects belief we need our Intellectual Property to define, support and constrain the work that is undertaken by Autonomous Agents. AI agents unable to expand outside of their IP driven license is a preferred methodology.

The destruction inflicted on North American oil & gas is tragic. Shale represents the greatest endowment of wealth ever placed within an industry, and to have that endowment emerge within the most powerful economy in history should have produced extraordinary results. Instead, in less than two decades, those entrusted with authority have accepted it as unprofitable, uncommercial, and incapable of generating acceptable returns. That outcome is all the more striking because many warned throughout that period that their prevailing methods were outdated and destructive. The investment community recognized the danger over a decade ago and withdrew support in order to limit its exposure and contain the scale of the damage. In that respect, the discipline imposed by investors may have prevented an even deeper collapse.

The earlier abdication of authority, responsibility, accountability, and control over industry resources has placed officers and directors in personal financial jeopardy. To persist with the same method of operation in the face of such clear damage and such an obvious need for change exposes them to even greater organizational dysfunction and compounds the failures already in evidence. Synallagi and our user community provide a means of resolving the issues identified in our March 27, 2026 paper. In practical terms, they offer a path by which those officers and directors may withdraw from this destructive position without further deepening the liabilities they would otherwise continue to incur.

Executive Summary

The preamble establishes the central theme of this paper: the business opportunity available to administrative and accounting professionals in North American oil & gas. These professionals can participate directly in rebuilding and reconstructing the industry’s culture around reserves preservation, performance and profitability. Their participation in our user community is instrumental to implementing the standards, expectations, aspirations, capabilities and authority required to achieve that outcome. Through our user community, they can establish their own organization, apply their oil & gas knowledge and contribute directly to the development of Synallagi.

The paper then turns to the configuration of our User Community Charter. It describes the business opportunity available to our user community, the revenue model supporting it and the work required to make it operational. It also addresses the critical role of Intellectual Property in the future of work and its application within our user community charter. The motivation of our user community must remain focused on providing for the most profitable means of oil & gas operations. In the Artificial Intelligence era we are entering, “blind, sleepwalking agents of whomever will feed them” is no longer acceptable. Our user community is business-focused, action-enabled and accountable.

The paper also details the multiple revenue streams available to our user community members and to the service provider organizations they own and operate. These revenue streams provide the foundation for developing businesses around Synallagi and oil & gas. Our user community also serves a critical bridging role between Information Technology and oil & gas, connecting software development capability with industry-specific administrative and accounting knowledge.

A historical review of the distinction between markets and firms is then undertaken through the work of Professors Elinor Ostrom, Oliver Williamson and Ronald Coase. The objective is to establish that transactions should occur at the lowest point of transaction cost. For the last century, hierarchies largely prevailed over markets. In the 21st century, however, stablecoins, crypto, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and other supporting institutions are creating a revolutionary dynamic in favor of market selection. This discussion is contained in Appendix III.

In a brief twenty-minute presentation, George Sivulka of hebia.ai outlines the Seven Pillars of Institutional Intelligence. People, Ideas & Objects has integrated these pillars into Synallagi as the Artificial Intelligence framework within our Information Technology Organizational Construct. This paper reviews these concepts for our user community to provide a foundation for discussion and to guide their development efforts. While the academic analysis in Appendix III examines the historical relationship between markets and firms, the hebia.ai Seven Pillars provide the forward-looking Artificial Intelligence perspective.

For our user community, Intellectual Property is foundational. As a licensee of Synallagi, our user community acquires a secure platform on which to build its organization. Intellectual Property is also an Organizational Construct of the software. It supports, defines and constrains the boundaries of each exclusive process domain. Those boundaries, in turn, constrain the environment in which Artificial Intelligence operates. Artificial Intelligence is the killer application for Intellectual Property. Our user community and its service provider organizations will operate with these advantages.

Throughout its work, People, Ideas & Objects has maintained that the oil & gas industry has been pursuing a destructive business model and strategy. That model would inevitably cause the industry to suffer. The consequences, however, extend beyond the industry itself. The societal dependence on oil & gas is far larger than the balance sheets of producers.

Warren Buffett’s description of the “institutional imperative” is directly relevant. He observed that rationality frequently collapses when managers mindlessly imitate the behavior of their peers or when the leader’s preferred business craving is supported by internal studies, regardless of its merit. People, Ideas & Objects have made this argument consistently. Synallagi provides every producer with the means to produce most profitably. Once that level of performance is achieved, each producer is endowed with the resources necessary to pursue its own independent strategy, lead its own firm and compete on its own merits. The industry’s repeated shifts from shale, to clean energy, back to shale, then consolidation and now international expansion are indicative of Buffett’s institutional imperative.

The industry now lacks the capacity and capability to conduct operations at the scale necessary to sustain productive deliverability. There is also an unwillingness by many parties to engage with North American producers for standard business activities while current leadership remains in place. Yet officers and directors continue to suggest they can resume prior production volumes, and they have convinced politicians and the public of that claim. This creates the conditions for industry damage to escalate into a broader societal disaster for North America. We have reached critical points in reserves deliverability before. We have not, however, reached them with shale representing the largest share of productive capacity. Avoiding that outcome is the purpose of People, Ideas & Objects’ work.

It is one thing to criticize the current structure. It is another to offer a solution. Our user community, its service provider organizations, Synallagi and People, Ideas & Objects are components of that solution. Together, they address the administrative and accounting failures that have had a detrimental financial impact on the industry. Through administrative and accounting reorganization, overhead costs can be converted into variable costs based on profitable production. Our user community and its service provider organizations represent a reallocation of resources away from producer-owned overhead structures and toward specialized, market-based process organizations. Each service provider can manage a defined process on behalf of the oil & gas industry, benefiting from advanced specialization and division of labor.

This structure does more than convert overhead into variable cost. It also enables the sharing of Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas software and services across the industry. This eliminates the need for each producer to build and maintain the same non-competitive administrative and accounting infrastructure as every other producer. The benefits of competitiveness, specialization, division of labor, shared infrastructure and variable overhead are significant. Yet they are secondary to the larger advantage: the ability of our user community to produce standard, objective, factual, high-quality and accountable reporting for each and every Joint Operating Committee.

Appendix II extends the Material Balance Report example introduced in our March 27, 2026 paper, 21st Century Marketplace Vision for Oil & Gas — Issues, and its related podcast. That paper discussed the influence of automation on the overall Material Balance Report and, specifically, the Systems Balance. This paper extends that work by addressing the autonomous elements of the Material Balance Report and their involvement in producing the report. It also includes a brief discussion of the Material Balance and Partnership Balance components of the Material Balance Report.

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Issues - Part VIII

Capital Asset Reporting

For more than two decades, People, Ideas & Objects has emphasized the importance of accurate reporting of property, plant, and equipment (PP&E) in oil & gas financial statements. Since at least 2004, we have argued that the current treatment of capital assets obscures the true financial condition of many producers. A review of producer financial statements today quickly reveals the issue: the PP&E account is disproportionate—often logarithmically larger than any other asset category on the balance sheet. Accepting these statements as representative of accountable and financially stable firms is difficult.

The magnitude of these capitalized assets raises a fundamental question regarding measurement and discipline. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) through the implementation of the Full Cost accounting framework and the Ceiling Test for oil & gas producers. The principle was straightforward: the value recorded for property, plant, and equipment should not exceed the commercial value of the reserves, as determined through an independent reserve report. The Ceiling Test mandates a write-down of the asset base if the recorded capital surpasses the economic value. This test establishes the absolute maximum capital and indicates the point at which a producer ceases to be a commercially viable operation. Producers are permitted to recognize capital costs at any value below this limit. This raises a crucial question: how frequently have we heard that a producer's assets are impaired due to the Ceiling Test?

The logic behind this rule is clear. When capital costs are overstated, the distortion carries through the financial statements. Every dollar of excess capitalization effectively inflates reported profitability. Apparent profitability then attracts additional investment capital seeking those returns. That influx of capital finances additional development activity, expanding production capacity. In commodity industries such as oil and natural gas—where producers function as price makers—excess capacity inevitably leads to overproduction and downward pressure on prices.

Shale development began accelerating in 2009. By 2026, nearly every producer is claiming substantial reserves of oil and natural gas. The volume of reserves booked from shale is considerable and it dwarfs the value of property, plant, and equipment. A critical point is that these booked reserves rely on incurring significant future capital expenditures to drill laterals etc and frac to complete what is currently classified as 'proven.' The ability to finance these large capital expenditures, or to operationally complete them when needed may become substantial issues when the high costs of shale are allocated over such significant volumes.

Overall industry performance has been so weak that much of the capital invested has been destroyed rather than compounded. This contradiction highlights the underlying problem: the capital base itself has been over-misrepresented.

People, Ideas & Objects therefore believe that a substantial pro-forma adjustment to PP&E is necessary to accurately reflect economic reality. Our assessment suggests that approximately 80 percent of the capitalized asset base should be recognized as depletion on a pro-forma basis to properly represent the condition of any producer. Our earlier estimates placed this adjustment closer to 65 percent. Our revision reflects the deterioration in commodity pricing structures. Natural gas has become a global commodity market, much like crude oil. Restoring pricing discipline after years of overproduction—particularly from North American shale development—will likely take many years. Making asset performance further degraded and reflected accurately on a pro-forma basis.

When the SEC introduced the Ceiling Test, it was intended to establish a limit on asset capitalization relative to commercial reserve value. In practice, however, many industry participants appeared to treat the Ceiling Test not as a constraint but as a target to be met each year. Achieving that target encouraged the capitalization of virtually every possible cost associated with operations. This included capitalized interest, capitalized overhead, and in certain cases even operating costs—practices the SEC identified in enforcement actions involving producers such as PennWest.

The broader implication is troubling. Accounting systems designed to enforce discipline have instead been used to maintain the appearance of asset growth and financial viability. When that occurs, transparency and accountability are compromised, and capital markets receive a distorted view of industry performance.

Time

Time is a central issue in oil & gas, although it is rarely recognized as such. In practical terms, time is inseparable from speed, and speed is inseparable from cost. The ability to act quickly—or the inability to do so—ultimately determines both financial performance and competitive position. For years, producers have been encouraged to move decisively. Instead, the industry appears to have entered a state of declining institutional inertia. Decisions are deferred, initiatives stall, and organizations operate largely on autopilot as market dynamics move far faster than internal processes. By the time a decision is made, the opportunity has already passed.

Organizationally, the industry appears almost petrified—perhaps even fossilized. The culture has long been described as “muddle through,” and the description is remarkably accurate. In practice, this means that if nothing is done, nothing changes. Any initiative proposed by employees is quickly neutralized through bureaucratic de-prioritization. After several such experiences, individuals learn to conform to the prevailing culture rather than challenge it.

Yet time also requires reflection. The industry must devote sufficient time to identifying the structural issues that now confront it. One of the most significant signals an organization can receive occurred more than a decade ago when investors withdrew their support from much of the sector. Producers have largely failed to recognize the severity of that signal. Since then, the pace and cadence of events—across regulatory, financial, operational, and political environments—have accelerated well beyond the capacity of existing organizational structures to respond. Leadership, however, has remained immobile, effectively cementing its position despite mounting consequences.

Time presents a second and more urgent challenge: velocity. The transition toward new technological and economic environments is occurring at unprecedented speed. Two factors must therefore be addressed simultaneously. First is the pace at which these changes are unfolding. Second is the speed at which organizations must operate once these technologies are in place. Rarely in history has a technology diffused across the economy as rapidly as the systems now emerging.

Within this context, Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration becomes a critical architectural solution. It provides the operational velocity required for a modern business infrastructure while dramatically reducing costs relative to current systems. When combined with Synallagi’s framework of specialization, division of labor, and shared infrastructure, variable administrative and accounting overhead costs may decline to a small fraction of present levels—potentially falling to single-digit percentages of current expenditures. Against this backdrop, the persistence of existing producer leadership and its established business model becomes increasingly difficult to justify.

In many respects, the future operating environment will function as though time itself has disappeared. Transactions, decisions, and operational processes will occur continuously through autonomous systems rather than through sequential human intervention. Organizations and individuals must therefore be structured to benefit from these technologies rather than obstruct them. This requires a level of trust in automated systems and the ability to supervise them at a distance. In many cases, a hands-off operational philosophy will become the governing principle.

Autonomous systems are highly sensitive to human interference. Even minor interventions can degrade their performance or invalidate the integrity of the data they rely upon. For this reason, governance must be carefully structured through our user community and its service providers, ensuring that every change is deliberate, authorized, and systematically evaluated. Data integrity must remain uncompromised; even the perception of unauthorized intervention can undermine system reliability.

Meanwhile, operational speed in the field will continue to increase. Demand for oil & gas—particularly in North America—shows little sign of slowing. As the world’s largest economy expands, its consumption of energy resources will grow accordingly. At the same time, the most accessible reservoirs are gradually depleted. The geological and engineering effort required to produce each additional barrel becomes progressively more complex and costly.

These realities place increasing pressure on the administrative and accounting infrastructure that supports exploration and production activities. Those systems must evolve to match and support the speed, complexity, and scale of modern oil & gas exploration and production operations. Without comparable advances in administrative capability, bureaucratic processes will increasingly constrain operational performance.

In other words, the oil & gas industry must develop administrative and accounting systems capable of operating at the same velocity as exploration and production activities. If it fails to do so, time itself will become the decisive factor—rendering today’s cumbersome bureaucracy almost efficient by comparison with what lies ahead.

Conclusion

This paper represents the principal issues that People, Ideas & Objects identifies within the North American oil & gas marketplace today. They are, in effect, the industry’s material issues. Some have persisted since 2009; others have emerged more recently. It is reasonable to expect additional challenges as we enter what many are describing as a new industrial era shaped by Artificial Intelligence.

Measured in terms of mechanical leverage, oil & gas has already delivered extraordinary benefits to society. Each barrel of oil equivalent represents roughly 10,000 to 25,000 hours of human labor. That achievement alone marks one of the greatest economic transformations in history. Yet it may only represent the beginning of what we can do with mechanical leverage.

Artificial Intelligence introduces a comparable form of intellectual leverage. Just as mechanical leverage amplified human labor, AI has the potential to multiply human decision-making, analysis, and coordination. The combination of these two forces—mechanical and intellectual leverage—signals the early stages of a new era of discovery.

This transition will not be gradual. It will likely unfold over the next few decades through highly disruptive change. Entire industries will be forced to adapt rapidly as new technologies generate value at unprecedented speed. Much of that value will accrue at the technological frontier where innovation is occurring. Oil & gas must now reposition itself at that frontier. The industry’s importance extends beyond its own economic interests; it remains fundamental to the energy systems that sustain modern society.

In this environment, inaction is no longer a viable option. Nor will the absence of perfect information justify delay. Decisions must be made and acted upon despite uncertainty. The speed of events demands it. Traditional approaches—designed for a different economic context—are no longer sufficient.

Progress will require a willingness to confront failure. Discovery is rarely linear. Failures must be examined carefully: determining whether they represent a terminal outcome or an opportunity for corrective action. Resilience, analysis, and persistence become essential capabilities. In practice, every meaningful success is preceded by numerous unsuccessful attempts.

The risk-mitigation frameworks developed during an era of perceived energy scarcity are poorly suited to the current environment of relative energy abundance created by shale development. New operating models and cultures must reflect this changed reality.

One conclusion is becoming increasingly clear. The emerging economic structure is less dependent on traditional hierarchical organizations and more dependent on individual expertise collaborating across distributed global networks. In this environment, assets—not organizations—become the primary units of economic activity. Ownership and coordination of those assets may increasingly occur through digital mechanisms such as tokenization, including tokenized interests associated with the Joint Operating Committee framework. Individuals organized through Synallagi and our user community which support the commercial operations of oil & gas Joint Operating Committees.

Recent commentary from the Hoover Institution’s Senior Fellow John F. Cogan, through his short podcast series The Grumpy Economist, highlights the role of stablecoins in this evolving financial architecture. These instruments offer extremely low transaction costs and operational efficiency that conventional financial systems will struggle to match. That structural advantage alone gives them significant competitive potential relative to existing monetary technologies.

The economic landscape is rapidly evolving. This presents substantial opportunities for those who are prepared to engage with it, but equally significant consequences for those who resist adaptation. Success in this environment, as in life, favors the prepared.

The current opportunity before the industry is arguably the most challenging—and potentially the most rewarding—it has ever faced. With Synallagi in hand, the industry would have the tools to capitalize on this potential. The only question is whether it will seize the moment.

References 

People, Ideas & Objects - Bibliography.

Glossary of Terms

Synallagi Summary

I'm Not Buying It.

People within the oil & gas industry need to ask themselves a direct question: given the facts as they stand today, why have producer officers and directors not been held accountable for the damage they had the authority, responsibility, and resources to prevent?

In 2015, oil & gas producer investors lost faith and trust in the industry’s ability to be accountable and profitable. They actively withdrew further financial support. Rather than address the substance of those concerns, producers continued promoting their supposed performance, discipline, and accountability while doing little to remedy the structural failures that caused investors to walk away.

They were warned of the consequences of inaction. They were offered a solution in the form of Synallagi. Yet as the damage and destruction spread across the industry, producer leadership watched it unfold and carried on with little more than a shrug. Capacity deteriorated. Service sector confidence collapsed. Accountability weakened. Competitiveness continued to atrophy. Profitability remained subordinate to excuses, narratives, and the preservation of executive control.

This past weekend, that failure appeared to reach a new level of disqualification. Both Exxon and Chevron were in the news warning consumers that oil prices were likely to rise. The audacity of that message is difficult to overstate. After years of blaming others, generating excuses, and assigning scapegoats, producer leadership now appears to be telling consumers, in effect, not to look to them for reliable oil & gas supply.

That is not leadership. That is an abdication of responsibility.

The industry should not accept this narrative. Producers know they are increasingly unable to meet market demand and are using war and geopolitical instability as convenient explanations for a price structure they created. Oil & gas is a price maker industry. People, Ideas & Objects has stated repeatedly that unprofitable production should not be produced in low-price environments. Those reserves should be preserved until higher prices make production commercially justified. Theoretically those volumes would be available today.

Instead, producers sold all their production at massive economic losses, obscured those losses through inadequate property-level accountability, preserved their positions and personal compensation while the industry’s and most particularly the service industry's productive and industrial capacities were materially weakened. Now, as prices become profitable, after they consumed valuable reserves in weak markets, they now warn consumers about the consequences of their self serving inactions.

This represents the fundamental breakdown of leadership. Producer directors and officers possessed the necessary resources, authority, and responsibility to intervene, yet they chose to disregard investor anxieties and spurned the proposed Synallagi solution. By doing so, they inflicted significant harm on the service sector and elsewhere. 

I’m not buying their warning to consumers. No one else should either, we must no longer tolerate these justifications; instead, we must insist on true accountability.

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Issues - Part VII

Evolution to the Next Great Thing

Capital Allocation

Over the past two decades, capital allocation in the North American oil & gas industry has rotated repeatedly—from SAGD to heavy oil, to shale, to declarations that shale would never be commercial, to clean energy, back to shale, and now to the assertion that shale cannot generate acceptable returns. Argentina, Iraq and Libya have become the latest destinations in this recurring search for the next narrative capable of “sustaining investor confidence.”

Extended periods of low interest rates enhanced this undisciplined pattern to accelerate. Leadership, guided solely by whatever represented the “best science” at the moment, made no serious attempt to evaluate or remediate underperforming investments. Once an asset proved unprofitable even to them, the industry simply shifted in lockstep to the next frontier.

The core issue is not geographic diversification. It is chronic strategic discontinuity and business confusion.

Producers have long behaved as if participation in the prevailing consensus asset focus was mandatory. If capital markets favored “X,” every company needed exposure to “X.” Without accurate, timely accounting and performance data, engineers and geologists could not determine which assets—if any—were truly performing. Following the crowd became the safest and most rational response.

This raises a fundamental governance question: Was capital deployment ever guided by a coherent, independent strategy, or was it largely directed by the perceived leadership signals of one or two prominent industry figures? For years, Harold Hamm of Continental Resources and others served as unofficial bellwethers for shale development. That model now demands reflection: does it still define the industry’s strategic direction, or has the center of gravity shifted?

Markets can accommodate geographic evolution. What they cannot tolerate indefinitely is repeated strategic oscillation in the absence of a disciplined framework for profitability and capital stewardship.

Synallagi offers dynamic, innovative, accountable, and profitable oil & gas producers the most profitable means of oil & gas operations. This enables producers to independently pursue their own strategies, driven by financial and operational performance, and ensures they can continue with the long-term confidence provided by profitable operations within a stable industry.

Service Sector Liquidation

It is difficult to understand how producers have allowed their essential service sector to deteriorate so severely. As the industry’s primary actors, they know full well that the tier-2 and tier-3 ecosystem is not peripheral—it is economically interdependent. Producer revenues are not created in a vacuum. They are made possible by a geographically dispersed, technically sophisticated service network that enables operations at continental scale. By forcing that network to absorb the entire impact of every downside of the boom-bust cycle, producers have systematically eroded its capacity, talent base, capital structure and now motivation.

This follows on Liberty Energy Ltd's fourth quarter 2025 report which saw all their operational highlights for the quarter fall within the domain of supplying energy to Artificial Intelligence installations. Liberty is the largest capacity frac operation. Chris Wright, the founder of Liberty is President Trump's Energy Secretary. Or there is Texas Pacific Land (TPL) partnership with Bolt Data & Energy to build large-scale data center campuses on its West Texas land, supported by a $50 million U.S. water supply rights and investment. Are these shifts in the service industries focus consequential?

The damage is now fundamental. Service-sector investors have largely decided that returning to the industry under the current structure is financially unsound. Having financed and built the infrastructure once, only to see its economics repeatedly ruined by market crashes and wilful cannibalization in order to survive, they are unwilling to fund it again without real reform and meaningful risk mitigation from producers. Suppliers will no longer participate in a system that systematically transfers all the risk to them while producers keep all the reward.

The typical producer strategy—cutting costs aggressively during self-inflicted downturns—confuses a short-term tactic with a long-term strategy. While cost control is necessary to eliminate waste, it is not a substitute for a sustainable operating model. Sudden, deep cuts to quarterly drilling programs send damaging shockwaves through the service complex, destroying equipment fleets, employee continuity, technical skill, and regional preparedness. These are not easy adjustments. As the decline rates of shale wells accelerate and global energy demand keeps rising, a constantly weakened service sector is becoming a major obstacle to increasing supply. Mobilizing, staffing, developing skills, and ensuring reliable operations are becoming much harder—and far more expensive. The long-term danger is a permanent reduction in North America’s oil & gas production deliverability.

A true solution requires an institutional overhaul, not just another round of budget cuts. Implementing Synallagi would be a disciplined, market-based effort to create the structures that stabilize both producers and the service sector. Without that framework, volatility will continue to destroy what remaining productive capital exists. 

Dividends or Survival

The financial history of the last four decades points to a systemic failure of leadership. When the industry changed its main success metric from profitability to cash flow, the result was not a surprise—it was predictable. Discipline in allocating capital weakened. Spending, funded by external sources, was mistaken for creating value. Revenue growth was incorrectly seen as strong earnings. Meanwhile, the underlying competitive strength declined.

The cash flow being generated now is too low relative to the high capital needs and risks of the business. Oil & gas producers are unable to compete for capital on North American capital markets.

By 2015, equity markets had essentially shut down. The continuous funding source that had quietly supported what was an obscure poor performance disappeared. While large institutions didn't sell off all their holdings—many still have significant stakes—they sent a clear message: structural underperformance would no longer be subsidized or accepted.

Fourth-quarter 2025 disclosures highlight this conflict. BlackRock, Citadel, Bridgewater, and other major institutional holders still have substantial exposure. Many producers remain 70–80% institutionally owned. Officers and directors face intense pressure to maintain high dividends and share repurchase programs—the standard indicators of high-return, competitively strong businesses.

The problem is structural. Operating performance in terms of cash generation has been declining for many decades. Distributions have increasingly relied on liquidating working capital and debt. Since 2015, sector-wide working capital has been in a structural decline, steadily reducing financial flexibility. Recent discussions about reducing buybacks and dividends is not a strategic shift; it is an admission of balance-sheet limitations.

Banks view the same situation from a different perspective. If producers prioritize distributions over reinvestment in operations, the risk of violating loan agreement covenants increases. Lenders are closely watching whether capital commitments are moving toward breach thresholds.

The industry now faces a clear choice: Continue to manage financial appearances—or implement structural reform.

Structural reform requires developing and implementing Synallagi to re-establish profitability as the key performance metric, rebuild competitive strength, and stabilize the service ecosystem on which production depends and rehabilitate the commodity markets supply / demand. These necessary internal structural capital investments will not, in the short term, produce shareholder distributions. They are recovery expenses. The time for minor changes is running out. Without reliable access to capital, accountable leadership, and a functional organizational model, the industry risks a permanent decline in strategic scope.

Financial Accountability Gap

My experience in developing Enterprise Resource Planning systems for oil & gas has led to an uncomfortable realization. Producers did not prioritize accountability. For decades, budgets for accounting departments, accounting systems and ERP infrastructure have been unnecessarily minimal compared to operational spending.

The consequence is severe. Management accounting tools for engineers and geologists are nonexistent. Accounting is seen as merely paying bills and ensuring corporate compliance—not as a means to measure performance. When assessing the performance of a property, operational leaders rely on independent engineering reserve reports and regional cost benchmarks. Recycle costs become the sole basis for judging a properties profitability.

In times of falling commodity prices, these recycle costs break-even metrics were adjusted downward—reflecting the market’s vendor discounts and reduced drilling volumes—enabling producers to be able to claim their unique accounting phenomenon of static profitability at progressively lower commodity price points. However, these were temporary service industry market adjustments, not lasting structural profit improvements. Recycle costs would apply to any prospective drilling operations and do not affect any of the historical accounting costs.

Investors eventually saw the discrepancy. Financial statements built on shaky foundations do not create lasting trust. Once trust is gone, access to capital shrinks. The question is not why funding became limited. The question is why, after more than a decade of restricted investor confidence, the architecture for accountability continues unaddressed?

Resurgent capital support requires demonstrable “real” profitability discipline. Without it, dividend and buy-back distributions have now become unsustainable, leverage risk will intensify, competition in North American capital markets expands and institutional patience erodes. The strategic issue is no longer rhetorical. It is structural. Combining this with the producers budgetary limitations in accounting and ERP for the past many decades. It is structural, cultural and deliberate unaccountability.
These strategic issues are no longer theoretical. They are fundamental.

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Issues - Part VI

Compliance, Governance and Access to Capital

Investors have already delivered their message to the oil & gas industry with unmistakable clarity—if only producer officers and directors were prepared to acknowledge it. The credibility of many producers’ financial reporting has been called into question, and the current leadership responsible for that reporting has lost the confidence of the investment community. After more than a decade of investor disengagement, it is reasonable to conclude that these concerns are not temporary or rhetorical. They reflect a profound loss of trust.

Consider the sequence that led to this outcome. Investors committed capital to oil & gas producers based on financial statements that appeared to demonstrate growing asset bases and strong profitability. Those results initially encouraged further investment. Over time, however, it became apparent that many producers were unable to generate sustainable returns without continuous inflows of external capital. When investors recognized this structural weakness, they withdrew their support, leaving producers dependent on their own cash flows.

In some cases, producers responded by redirecting available capital into unrelated clean-energy investments or other ventures, presenting these actions as strategic shifts in corporate focus. Faced with such circumstances, investors are left with a fundamental question: how should they respond when leadership abandons the original business model that justified the initial investment? And how is our understanding of this leadership improved when they’re faced with all their feasible options being unavailable. They move into the most unaccountable areas of the globe. Attempting to negotiate with management may prove ineffective, yet the problem clearly extends beyond any single producer firm.

The appropriate answer is that this challenge belongs to the entire industry. Accountability cannot be treated as a minimum regulatory requirement. It must become a defining cultural principle. The only acceptable standard is to exceed regulatory expectations, not merely comply with them.

Synallagi addresses this requirement directly by proposing a new cultural and organizational framework for the industry. As discussed in the January 20, 2025 paper, “Reconstructing Oil & Gas: Enabling Engineers and Geologists to be This Century’s Pioneers and Lead the Industry’s Future,” the rebuilding of the sector depends on new leadership and new business models. Investors are already exploring alternative opportunities within the industry itself, such as those described in “Oil & Gas Arbitrage: The Market Finds a Way.” These developments underscore the need to move beyond the traditional “drill and produce” paradigm that has defined the sector for decades.

The challenge of restoring investor confidence should not be underestimated. Many of the cultural norms that developed within the industry must be abandoned. Expressions such as “building balance sheets” or “putting cash in the ground” reflect an outdated mindset that prioritized asset accumulation over “real” profitability. The producers capable of regaining investor confidence will adopt a very different financial profile.

In a truly high-performing organization—one that is dynamic, innovative, accountable, and profitable—the balance sheet would show minimal or even near-zero values in property, plant, and equipment. Such a result would indicate that the firm’s profits have been sufficient to fully recover its capital costs. The integrity of that accounting position would signal both exceptional profitability and a financially robust enterprise.

It is important to distinguish between accounting and value. Accounting measures operational performance; it does not determine the value of a producer. The value of an oil & gas company is ultimately defined by its reserve base, as documented in independent reserve reports. Accounting simply records how effectively those assets are converted into profitable operations. A near-zero PP&E balance would demonstrate that profits have been used to retire the firm’s capital costs—an outcome fully consistent with the SEC’s Full Cost accounting requirements and the Ceiling Test.

The Ceiling Test was designed as a safeguard to ensure that capitalized assets never exceed the commercial value of reserves as evaluated by independent engineers. In practice, however, many industry participants treated the Ceiling Test not as a limit but as a target, striving each year to capitalize costs up to the maximum permitted threshold. This interpretation undermined the discipline that the rule was intended to impose.

Looking forward, one of the first criteria investors will use to determine whether a producer is investable will be the Enterprise Resource Planning system used to manage day-to-day operations. Approaching investors with the same cultural assumptions and legacy tools that contributed to past failures will almost certainly end the conversation before it begins. Trust, credibility, and transparency must be demonstrable, and the absence of systems capable of delivering those qualities will signal that accountability is not a genuine priority today, and therefore never.

Participation in the development of the People, Ideas & Objects architecture, including the design and implementation of our user community and its supporting infrastructure, would represent a meaningful initial step. While such participation alone may not immediately restore investor confidence, it would indicate a willingness to pursue structural reform. Rebuilding trust after years of questionable accounting practices will inevitably take time.

When investors withdrew from the industry in 2015, that moment should have triggered immediate action. The fact that little substantive reform has occurred since then only deepens the challenge confronting future producers.

Synallagi, delivered through the Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas platform, has been designed to support producers of any size. At its core lies the Joint Operating Committee, the primary organizational construct through which oil & gas properties are governed. Ultimately, the structure of any producer organization reduces to a straightforward question: ownership and management of a defined portfolio of properties. Synallagi provides the framework required to administer those assets with transparency, discipline, and accountability—precisely the qualities investors now demand.

Technology and Data Integrity

The AI revolution enables a myriad of associated technologies:

• Decentralized Finance: Legalization of stablecoins will enable electronic payments and transactions on a new scale, while crypto allows for the securitization and tokenization of assets like oil & gas wells and Joint Operating Committees through new blockchain protocols such as Solana. How many of the producers Agentic AI agents will have payment authority through a stablecoin? How will these transactions be captured?

• Automation: Internet of Things (IoT) and satellite-based cellular networks facilitate a seamless flow where People, Ideas & Objects can automate processes from field data capture to financial statements, as envisioned in our Material Balance Report. (And its podcast.) Our ambitious goals sees the industry achieve System Balance across all continental production, utilizing autonomous systems to aid in the reconciliation and balancing of this comprehensive and complex task.

The critical foundation for this new environment is pristine data integrity. A properly documented and implemented data model is essential to prevent the "garbage in, garbage out" scenario, which is amplified by the use of Artificial Intelligence, Markets, Autonomy, Orchestration, and the Future of Work. Targeting Frameworks will be the topic of a future 2026 paper.

Synallagi is designed to meet the demands for markets and transaction orchestration, fundamentally altering the industry's organizational structure.

• Variable Costs and Service Providers: Accounting and administrative functions are reallocated to our user community and service providers, each managing a single, hyperspecialized process for the entire industry. This decentralization results in Joint Operating Committees potentially receiving thousands of microtransaction invoices representing producers' overhead costs incurred each month. Stablecoins make this possible and affordable.

• Autonomous Orchestration: Dynamic Artificial Intelligence driven transactions demand the producers have a capacity to orchestrate the speed and complexity of these thousands of transactions and micro-transactions. This contrasts with the present day where human workers are bogged down in mundane transactional data processing, chasing an "expanding pile of exceptions and conflicts."

• The Marketplace Interface: Our Marketplace Interface is one of two key operational environments, enabling market participants to conduct business based on designated authority. Eliminating the limits of time and distance, fostering the serendipity and spontaneous order necessary for creative destruction, market evolution and providing the means to access products, services and software that ensures asset profitability. Human roles shift away from a transactional focus toward creative, collaborative action and strategic thinking.

It is a far greater ambition to suggest that the complexity and speed of even today's markets can be managed by producers on a perpetual, ad-hoc basis. To attempt this independently—with each producer building their own IT resources, despite the industry's established partnerships represented in the Joint Operating Committee—is a plan they know they could never propose. There comes a time when sheer volume, velocity, paradoxes, technologies, conflicts, and contradictions overwhelm the status quo and consign it to face the facts of the day.

Discussions of Artificial Intelligence often categorize data into two types: open and closed. Closed data is proprietary information, such as producer and Joint Operating Committee data stored in an ERP system. Security attributes like privileges, read/write access, encryption and more tightly controlled access to this data. Synallagi is based on Oracle Cloud ERP, which can manage this structured closed data, access open data from public and web sources, and derive additional proprietary value from the combined results. This capability mirrors tools like Palantir and DataBricks; however, those tools typically access proprietary data from unstructured sources, while Synallagi is designed to manage transactions, handle and generate the structured, closed data derived from those transactions.

People, Ideas & Objects has consistently prioritized the organizational, cultural and industry structure required to achieve desired profitable performance in producer firms. Information Technology has always been our essential tool to identify, support, and constrain these structures, never leading the initiative. However, businesses occasionally need to adapt, leaving behind old ways for new ones. This is such a time, where IT significantly influences the structure of both businesses and industries. The challenge addressed here is accommodating this influence, and Synallagi outlines our method for combining these elements.

Execution Risk

The appropriate question is not whether execution risk exists, but for whom does it exist?.

Synallagi is comprehensive by necessity. That is not excess; it reflects the structural realities of the twenty-first century. The scope and scale of the task are formidable—nearly incomprehensible when viewed in totality. Yet at an industry-wide level, it is achievable. Fragmented, producer-by-producer implementation is not a viable alternative. Interdependence of the technologies with organizational and industry re-architecture is a necessity.

Absent coordinated participation, each producer would confront the same structural challenges independently: administrative complexity, accounting integration, regulatory compliance, and system architecture at enterprise scale. The available population of qualified administrative, accounting, and Information Technology professionals capable of executing that work is limited. Competition for those scarce resources would escalate compliance costs and incentivize redundant, internally developed systems built upon disparate conceptual models. The result would be fragmentation, inefficiency, and increased operational risk. It would not address the issues identified.

It is often argued that Artificial Intelligence will materially ease the burden of Enterprise Resource Planning development. That assertion is directionally correct. Artificial Intelligence is improving rapidly, and Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration incorporates it extensively. However, this paper underscores a critical distinction: Artificial Intelligence must operate within disciplined architectures and under appropriate human supervision.

Synallagi embeds Artificial Intelligence at scale, but it does so with structured oversight in development and active governance during operations. Artificial Intelligence is a tool of execution, not a substitute for institutional design.

Execution risk, in this context, is difficult to even quantify when the industry—already experiencing structural deterioration—declines to engage constructively in its own remediation. Without active, informed, and sustained participation from producers, their risk remains elevated.

And to return to the initial question: who bears that execution risk?

Exclusively the oil & gas producers themselves. If this project were to fail, it would not be due to Synallagi’s conceptual deficiency or user community based development. It would result from an unwillingness among producers to participate in the structural transformation required for their own survival.