At the recent DUG-Midcontinent conference in Oklahoma City, Newfield Exploration’s Midcontinent general manager, Pat McCelvey, enlightened attendees as to the nature of a “self-improvement gift.” It’s one of those gifts you’re not so sure you wanted, he said, signaling a deficiency on your part that you didn’t know existed, but which a spouse or an in-law has identified and which now is deemed to require improvement.

“It seems that last year we received a self-improvement gift from our in-laws from OPEC,” McCelvey said. “They decided we’d got too used to $100 per barrel oil, too careless about practices, and too reckless with our investments. I’m not sure they really want us to get better, but that is surely what will happen. We all got busy reducing our cost structure and focusing on our investments to make the most sense of this environment.”

Others agree. It’s not what we wanted. But it’s forcing change—change for improvement.

Wil VanLoh, president and CEO of Quantum Energy Partners, looks forward to some of the unintended consequences of the Saudi-led move last November to let free market forces set the price for crude oil.

“The irony here,” VanLoh said in an interview for this month’s cover story, “is that the plunge in oil prices is going to make the U.S. producer one of the most economical and low-cost producers in the world. The lower commodity price is causing the cost structure in the U.S. oil and gas sector to become much more competitive. I think that, within 12 months, many of the plays that were uneconomic at $50/bbl are going to be economic again.”

He went on to note that 80% or more of all production growth globally over the past five years has come from the U.S., even though it accounts for only about 13% of the world’s total liquids production. This trend is unlikely to abate as the oilfield service sector’s costs continue dropping to whatever levels are needed to incentivize E&Ps to drill wells.

The upshot?

“You’re in the process of massively driving down the cost structure of the only country in the world that can actually grow production meaningfully,” VanLoh said. “The U.S. oil and gas industry is going to be able to make very good returns in a $50 to $60/bbl price environment. You could be looking at a situation a year from now where rig counts start going up again.”

And what could be clouding the horizon in the interim?

VanLoh points to the short-term risk of rising U.S. crude production bumping up against maximum storage levels at Cushing in the weeks ahead.

“We’re still growing production at a time when there may be nowhere to store it. You can’t export it, so there’s the risk you have a situation where U.S. light sweet crude trades at an even greater discount to the already very low price for Brent,” VanLoh said. “We think U.S. prices could go meaningfully lower in the near term. We’re not predicting that, but I think there’s a reasonable probability that it could occur.”

Back at the DUG-Midcontinent conference, a similar concern was expressed by John Rutherford, executive vice president with Plains All American Pipeline LP, which operates about 22 million barrels of storage at Cushing. Hitting maximum operational capacity was likely to occur “sometime in the next couple of months,” he said in late February, with “a negative impact on prices, as you would imagine.”

However, markets have a way of anticipating events, sometimes far in advance, and several analysts note as a mitigating factor that Cushing is less isolated than in similar periods in the past. It now has access to some 1.5 million barrels per day of pipeline capacity that can connect it to the larger storage capacity along the Gulf Coast.

In any event, once the shoe at Cushing has dropped, Plains’ model shows the “call” on U.S. and Canadian production—now the combined “de facto swing producer” from an economic, if not a geopolitical perspective—to be exceeding projected supply growth, at an assumed price of $50/bbl, starting sometime in 2016.

“Most importantly, structurally, we don’t have enough supply in North America, in a $50/bbl world, to feed the rest of the world. As you roll into 2016, there’s a call on U.S. and Canadian supply, and production is declining. In 2017, it gets worse.”

And with “less than 5%” OPEC spare capacity, the message is that—at some point in time—“the world needs sustainable North American production growth,” Rutherford said.