Oil megaprojects won't stay on the shelf for long

ONE casualty of the oil price downturn could be the megaproject.

For years, as conventional oil reserves became depleted and increasingly hard to find, oil companies ventured into far-flung locales to find new sources of production.

Extracting oil from these frontier areas required more advanced technology and a lot more capital: Ultra deepwater, Arctic offshore, heavy oil sands, and increasingly, the Lower Tertiary.