As long as they are successful in their undertakings while being cash-positive, they will succeed in getting the money they need to grow their business. Eventually, they can decide to sell their entire business to larger independents or bigger oil companies, as well as to go public. Their time-frame for success, thus, is much shorter than that of big multinational oil companies: they couldn’t afford the be cash-negative for long periods of time, otherwise their investors could stop supplying money; they cannot be unsuccessful in their growth-strategies, otherwise they cannot make money by selling part (of all) of their equity. Although highly innovative, then, oil independents usually do not do not engage in proprietary technology development (an exception is represented by larger independents), but they apply or adapt existing technologies in innovative ways to new targets, improving their processes and applications, thanks to the help of oil service companies (such as Halliburton or Schlumberger) that are the real owners of technological know-how in the oil and gas sector. Another feature of the U.S. (and Canada) oil and gas sector is the presence of several financial institutions, funds, capital ventures, equity firms that are eager to fund independent companies, oftentimes by becoming their equity partners. A final, unique feature of the U.S. (and Canadian) hydrocarbon arena is the broad availability and flexible market of drilling rigs and other essential tools of oil exploration and production. For instance, the U.S. and Canada have about 65 percent of all drilling rigs existing in the world. All these features are foreign to other parts of the world, and they make the U.S. and Canada a sort of unique play for experimentation and innovation, such in the case of U.S. shale oil and gas or Canadian tar sands.
As long as they are successful in their undertakings while being cash-positive, they will succeed in getting the money they need to grow their business. Eventually, they can decide to sell their entire business to larger independents or bigger oil companies, as well as to go public. Their time-frame for success, thus, is much shorter than that of big multinational oil companies: they couldn’t afford the be cash-negative for long periods of time, otherwise their investors could stop supplying money; they cannot be unsuccessful in their growth-strategies, otherwise they cannot make money by selling part (of all) of their equity. Although highly innovative, then, oil independents usually do not do not engage in proprietary technology development (an exception is represented by larger independents), but they apply or adapt existing technologies in innovative ways to new targets, improving their processes and applications, thanks to the help of oil service companies (such as Halliburton or Schlumberger) that are the real owners of technological know-how in the oil and gas sector. Another feature of the U.S. (and Canada) oil and gas sector is the presence of several financial institutions, funds, capital ventures, equity firms that are eager to fund independent companies, oftentimes by becoming their equity partners. A final, unique feature of the U.S. (and Canadian) hydrocarbon arena is the broad availability and flexible market of drilling rigs and other essential tools of oil exploration and production. For instance, the U.S. and Canada have about 65 percent of all drilling rigs existing in the world. All these features are foreign to other parts of the world, and they make the U.S. and Canada a sort of unique play for experimentation and innovation, such in the case of U.S. shale oil and gas or Canadian tar sands.