You're listening to the oil and gas this week podcast with Mark LeCore and Paige Wilson.

This is the show for busy oil pros who quickly want to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry.

You're listening to Oil and Gas This Week podcast brought to you by IBM.

This is the show for busy oil pros who want to quickly keep their finger on the pulse of the industry.

Thanks for joining us for episode 226.

How's it going, Mark?

It's going awesome.

We're in the new year. There's no new viruses.

You know, just the one that keeps mutating and stuff. No big deal. Yeah. So we didn't do your predictions at the end of December. So are you ready to share some of those things now? Yeah. So the reason that we didn't do the predictions at the end of this summer was contractual and financial obligations. Other companies have paid for exclusivity for that. Big shout out to Technique FMC, who people, if you're listening to this, you already heard this on the internal Technique FMC podcast. Yeah. This could be the same predictions, maybe the little bit more flare. But yeah, let's get into it.

And audience, this is, please, please, please.

I do this every year.

I've been doing it since, I think, 2014.

And I don't have a crystal ball.

This is based upon the business conversations I have with leaders of the industry, my own experience, the data that we research ourselves.

But of all the times I've done predictions,

this is the one time where I tell everybody by no means you don't use my predictions to make

business decisions. This last year in 2020 was crazy trying to predict what you didn't predict

that, buddy. Actually, if you go back and listen to 2020, no, I did not predict double black swan. I did not

predict the pandemic, but I did predict other stuff that came pretty darned close. I was kind of

surprised myself. But trying to predict what's happened in 2021 oil and gas is extremely hard. So this is

my best shot at. Like I said, this is the one I'd ask people have the least amount of faith in

of all the years I've been doing this. But a couple things before we get into predictions. One thing is we just come out of this election. You have a lot of people think that the oil and gas industry is getting ready to disappear completely in the next five years. That's not true. Hydrocarbons will never go away. It's one of those valuable molecules to mankind ever. And we also hear people talking about peak oil demand has

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