This is the first article in a seven-part series examining the changing dynamics of the oil and energy industry: Introduction | BP | Exxon | Chevron | Shell | Total | Statoil

In 1998, the Asian economic crisis plunged the world closer and closer toward global crisis. Benchmark oil prices soon plunged from $24 to $12. The future of the industry looked gloomy. This transformation in the oil price environment sparked the most comprehensive reshaping and restructuring of the oil and gas industry since trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt broke up Standard Oil in 1911.

My upcoming posts will be a series of articles about the strategies being employed by each of the major oil companies to cope with the radical shifts underway. I will kick off here by giving an overview of what they are dealing with.

Through 1998, executives at oil majors like Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, BP and Amoco began to exchange phone calls, as the industry leaders began to consider the possibility of survival through scale by discussing mergers. The product of those discussions quickly resulted in Exxon gobbling up Mobil, the creation of BP-Amoco, and Chevron absorbing Texaco, as every company feared being left out of the flurry of headline deals. The New York Times hailed the era of the '"New Oil Behemoth."

The question then, as now, was how to remain competitive at a lower oil price? Many newspaper articles from 1998 mirror the issues grabbing headlines today — a struggling industry, a technological revolution, the onset of a new era in industry structure, but a rebuttal of charges that the good days are over. Mobil CEO Lucio Noto told reporters "this is not a combination based on desperation."

The difference this time is perhaps that oil majors are beginning to accept that the challenge they face now might reflect the dreaded "lower for longer" scenario. The majors are certainly in the crisis zone; all the household names reported dismal earnings for 2015.

BP's share price fell to its lowest level in six years last month on the back of worse-then-expected figures, making a full-year loss for 2015 of $5.2 billion. I will be analyzing signs of a realignment of the company's senior management team and drastic job cuts to its 80,000-strong global workforce.

This time around, supermergers look less likely. Last April, Shell — which was one of the few major companies not to participate in in the merger frenzy in the early 2000s — absorbed BG Group for $50 billion and provoked speculation from analysts that "it is not whether or when that restructuring will take place but rather who is next?"

That drama has not come to pass. Indeed, the success of the smaller, more nimble independents that now dominate the shale industry have challenged the notion that bigger is better in the oil industry. It seems efficiency gains at these firms are more likely not through consolidation but by becoming leaner, managing cash flows and embracing the digital revolution.

Publicly, executives speak of innovation and harnessing technology to combat new and forbidding challenges in the industry. BP's Bernard Looney insists that "this is not a sunset industry, far from it," instead taking his team on a field trip to Silicon Valley to draw on the Big Data innovations that can be applied to the major's wells.

There are a range of options on the table, and it is likely to be accompanied by changes at the top. On the eve of the price collapse, management consultancy Oliver Wyman released a report in 2014 asking "Whatever happened to Big Oil?" and called for a restructuring of the largest companies.

The analysts noted the operating cash flow of these companies underperformed oil prices even as they were rising, and stock valuations have also trailed behind the growth. They offered up options of integrating by bringing capital spending back under control and diverting it back to shareholders, or disintegrating by putting assets up for sale. They also suggested that majors might being to rebuild internal technological and engineering capacities in-house rather than continuing to outsource to oil service providers.

The dynamics of the oil industry mean it is characterized by constant but periodic restructuring. It is notoriously difficult to predict the future structure of the oil business, perhaps as much of a fool's game as predicting oil prices themselves. But we can observe the forces that will shape that future, and look out for signs of discussions going on it board rooms from Paris to Houston over how ride out the latest changes.