If oil costs $107 a barrel, the industry would lose $2.3bn this year but the current level of $135 a barrel would push that deficit to $6.1bn, Iata warned.
With oil over $100 a barrel, the industry got used to living high on the hog, but those days are gone.
When prices collapsed in 1998 to about $12 per barrel, the industry was forced to take a billion barrels of oil and gas off its books, despite the fact that those reserves were still likely to come to market when prices rebounded.
But the output of shale wells declines rapidly, by 60-70% in their first year, so within a couple of years this oil will stop flowing.Second, it is far less clear if, at $70 a barrel, the industry can profitably invest in new wells to maintain or boost production.
Although Royal Dutch/Shell is the largest producer of oil in the deep waters of the gulf, BP owns the most oil and gas reserves, an estimated 3.5 billion barrels of oil and natural gas, about one-quarter of the 13 billion barrels the industry is developing in the region.
By January, oil prices had climbed above $100 a barrel, plunging the industry into crisis.
When oil prices are around $100 a barrel, the Russian industry and the government together make about $1 billion a day from export sales of oil and natural gas.
Chevron earns among the highest profits per barrel in the industry because its output is skewed toward oil, as opposed to natural gas, whose price has been falling.
The lifting price for Russian oil, the cost of getting it out of the earth, is $1 to $1.50 per barrel, and the industry would break even at a barrel price of $14.
