Executive Summary

In this report, we identify the top 20 themes that would impact the oil and gas industry in 2021. For each theme, we offer a series of predictions, highlight the winners, and point you to further reading.

Our Top 20 Themes For 2021

We classify our top 20 themes for 2021 into three categories - industry, technology, and macroeconomic themes. The macroeconomic themes of COVID-19 and sustainability continue to disrupt the industry in 2021, as oil and gas companies look to navigate the energy transition and adapt to the impacts of renewable energy, hydrogen, electric vehicles (EV), energy storage, liquefied natural gas (LNG), gas flaring, circular plastic economy, shale, subsea, integrated refineries, gas to liquids (GTL) and IMO 2020.

This report also features disruptive tech themes impacting the oil and gas industry in 2021, which will be of paramount importance as the industry looks to become more efficient. These are: robotics, Industrial Internet, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, and cybersecurity.

Our Thematic Research Ecosystem

Companies who invest in the right themes become success stories; those who miss the big themes end up as failures. Given that so many themes are disruptive, it is very easy to be blindsided by industry outsiders who invade your sector.

So, to help our clients gain competitive advantage, we have developed GlobalData's thematic research ecosystem, a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors.

How To Use This Report

GlobalData's thematic research ecosystem consists of our thematic engine – which scores companies across all major sectors on all major themes – supported by three tiers of thematic reports, helping our clients look into the future: - Single theme: These reports offer in-depth research into a specific theme (e.g.

subsea). They identify leaders and challengers based on factors, such as market position, technology leadership, and other factors.

• Multi theme: These reports cover all companies and all themes within a sector, giving readers a strong sense of how everything fits together and how conflicting themes might interact with one another.

• Sector scorecard: Each sector scorecard has a thematic screen, a risk screen, and a valuation screen. Live sector scorecards are available on our client portal.

This report is a multi-theme report covering 20 themes, drawn from industry, technology, and macroeconomics. It depicts a short-term outlook for the industry from the perspective of these 20 themes.

For further details of our market-leading thematic methodology, please refer to the appendix at the back of this report.