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Yeah, could go down, could go up, could stay about the same, right?

Van Beurden wasn’t trying to predict the oil price. He was trying to do something much harder: instill a culture of thrift inside a giant oil and gas company. This is about resilience, not clairvoyance.

Shell, like its peers but more so, went on an investment binge when oil prices were in triple digits, with capital expenditure peaking at $40 billion in 2013 alone. As so often in the commodities business, all that spending on new supply helped touch off a crash, leading to a predictable effect on returns:

All oil companies have of course scrambled to cut costs amid the downturn.

But Van Beurden’s “lower forever” comment tells you that, as an aspiration at least, this isn’t just about laying off some contractors and putting cheaper coffee in the staff room.

The original sin of the oil business is its long-standing assumption that, even if it occasionally lost its head in a boom and suffered in a subsequent downturn, demand would always go up, taking prices with it. A project’s net present value might end up looking like a car crash, but it would at least generate cash flow for future spending and dividends at some point.

This is what “lower forever” really means — not that prices will never go up again (Venezuela’s slide toward further sanctions and chaos is just one reason why oil could go higher from here). Rather, it’s that, even if prices do go up again, the company won’t chase them with bigger budgets and ever more supply just for the sake of it.