The rising oil price has probably made some prospective exploration assets viable, but what about the effect of advancing technology?
US integrated oil giant Chevron has produced first gas from a field in the North Sea that was first discovered forty years ago and deemed at the time to be unviable to develop.
The gas reservoir lies some 4,900 yards below the sea-bed, which was way too deep for the technology of the seventies but not for whatever it is we are calling this decade.
Technology is a double-edged sword, of course, as evidenced by the embarrassing admission by supermarkets group Tesco PLC (LON:TSCO) that there had been some suspicious activity on around 40,000 Tesco Bank accounts, which have presumably been hacked. Around half of the hacked accounts have had money sucked out of them, but Tesco pledged to recompense all of those whose accounts had been looted.
All transactions for Tesco’s current account customers have been temporarily frozen, while the company gets to grips with its network security.
.@tescobankhelp some really suspicious activity on my credit card this weekend. Lots of alcohol and takeaways. Not me....Honest.
— Josh Hawkins (@joshyphawkins) November 7, 2016
As a precaution we have notified some customers that we have blocked their cards to protect their account - https://t.co/m8zjO6BKgj
— Tesco Bank Help (@tescobankhelp) November 6, 2016
Talking of Tesco, it is not that long ago that the main thing it had to worry about was keeping jars of Marmite on the shelves, as it got involved in a stand-off with foods giant Unilever over who should bear the brunt of the effects of the plunge in the value of sterling.
We still don’t know who won that battle, but we do know that US firms PepsiCo and Nomad Foods are planning price increases in the UK for much-loved items of comfort food.
PepsiCo is planning to raise the price of Walker’s crisps, which many of us would happily accept if the company only stopped going against the natural order of things and made its cheese & onion crisp packets predominantly green (as in Green Onions) and its salt & vinegar crisp packets predominantly blue (as in the little blue packets of salt that used to feature in crisp packets before the advent of ready-salted crisps).
The price of a standard bag of air accompanied by a few crisps is set to rise to 55p from 50p, PepsiCo said.
Nomad Foods, meanwhile, is looking to up the prices of fish fingers, among other things, from next month.
The owner of the Bird's Eye brand said it would try to absorb as many of the increased costs as possible related to sterling's decline.