With the growing oil and gas crisis, Houston expert suggests an investment in tech

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Now is the time for oil and gas companies to embrace modern technology solutions. Getty Images

The oil and gas industry has always been volatile. The profitability of leading companies has largely stemmed from their ability to predict future changes and therefore adapt to them. However, when a truly unpredictable situation happens, uncertainty clouds the entire market.

Such a structural shift has occurred at the intersection of the marketplace and COVID-19. The traditional energy sector must find ways to change, but it has to occur in non-traditional ways. We believe that technology will show us a way forward.

At the beginning of 2020, the oil and gas market looked optimistically at its forecasts for the year. Those predictions were left in shambles after the OPEC debacle and the novel coronavirus wreaked havoc on the world. Those events combined to cause demand shortages that led to historically low and unsustainable price points for the industry.

Therefore, we predict a lot of bankruptcies and layoffs until we see economies come back online and demand increase. However, companies with a strong cash flow and minimal debt should use this as an opportunity to turn technology into profitability, but it will require a willingness to learn and try new things.

At EAG Services & EAG 1Source, our midstream and upstream clients look to us for solutions. While they focus on combating the unknown and staying afloat, our team conducts diligent internal investigations to locate technological and infrastructure answers.

We have assembled three actionable insights in response to the shifts experienced by many oil and gas companies.

Lean into the digital age by automating your processes

The importance of accurate and timely data is at an all-time high as headcounts decrease and human capital becomes more valuable. By investing in automation, you'll increase business efficiency as a hedge against workforce risks. You will also achieve simplicity, transform your digital presence, and increase service quality and delivery.

Such tools should automatically capture, process, and extract essential data for executing routine processes. This includes information such as POP statements, invoices, meter readings, and non-operated statements that can be integrated into your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System. These next-generation intelligent information systems combine workflows, content management, and automatic classification of files based on the meta-data most important to your organization.

Recognizing the value of your employee and their time goes a long way, especially in an emergency situation. It is imperative you give them tools that helps them operate as efficiently as possible so they can make rapid and informed decisions. During this time more than ever it is essential that your resources are able to quickly correlate information, and analyze and provide you with answers to determine your next move.

Provide remote access with cloud hosting

While many oil and gas companies look for ways to cut costs due to low consumer demand, cloud hosting offers you opportunities to eliminate capital purchases of IT hardware. Moving applications to the cloud not only helps protect your important data, but it inherently forces your organization into a remote work mentality.

Additionally, as team sizes and workloads shift, cloud computing offers essential flexibility to either grow or shrink, as many cloud and infrastructure hosting firms offer a "pay-as-you-use" model. Cloud computing also provides solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity by delivering data to your remote offices with enhanced security.

Establish a cybersecurity plan to protect your data

We've seen a rise in phishing attempts and cyber-attacks over the last month. Hackers recognize that people are in a unique situation, so they disguise themselves as "updates" and "signups" for news regarding COVID-19.

Do not let your employees or business assets fall victim to a cybersecurity incident. Give your staff secure access to data by providing systems with tools and software that block exploits and filter out malicious attacks.

Your company's exposure increases when corporate devices lack necessary security capabilities. This is true whether your employees connect to corporate assets from remote locations or use non-managed devices. You company should consider company laptops, change how users access corporate data, and deploy anti-virus and management tools to home-bound employees on a temporary basis.

Even with the unprecedented changes across the oil and gas industry, we've seen many businesses implement these modifications and succeed. By introducing technology that integrates their systems, they are weathering the current storm and preparing for unforeseeable threats in the future. Those who adapt and invest in technology today will be sustainable and scalable tomorrow.

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Elizabeth Gerbel is CEO of EAG Services and EAG 1Source, which provides business process, technology, and advisory services to the midstream and upstream oil and gas market,

Elizabeth Gerbel, CEO and founder of Houston-based E.A.G. Services Inc., shares how to navigate M&A activity for both startups and large companies. Pexels

All is not lost in a merger or acquisition, says this Houston energy exec

Guest column

Nervous about an upcoming merger or acquisition? You're not alone. Last year, there were nearly 15,000 mergers and acquisitions in the U.S., according to the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances. These transactions, although executed with optimistic intentions, don't always work out. What is it that separates those that deliver from those whose results simply fall flat?

While you won the legal battle, the real culprit to a failed merger or acquisition transaction lies in post-deal activities such as integrating the divesting company's assets into the acquiring company's existing systems, processes, and organizational structure. If executed poorly, companies could face several hurdles, including:

Increased acquisition costs
Loss in previously efficient business processes
Reduced data quality in current and acquired assets
Extended TSA timeline

With the stakes being high, it is critical for each step of a merger or acquisition to be rock solid before moving on to the next stage. In fact, when executed successfully, an M&A transaction can significantly benefit both companies — from startups to well-established corporations.

A strategy for M&A data integration

In order to facilitate efficient and effective merger or acquisition, the critical success factors focus on these driving goals: Minimizing organizational disruption and Maximizing ROI. To achieve these goals, we execute three main stages for every merger and acquisition.

Planning
Analysis
Execution

We start with thorough planning, think of planning as the foundation for a successful merger or acquisition. Without a good plan, the company will be vulnerable to all sorts of structural weaknesses. To prevent key elements from falling through the cracks, companies must define objectives and data requirements, maintain strong communications, and develop both short-term and long-term expectations.

The next step – analysis – since data is absolutely essential in mergers and acquisitions. There is a lot to watch out for: What's the best way to extract and convert the acquired data? Will IT or business support need to be permanently added? What system configuration changes are required? What are the impacts to current business processes and internal audit controls? Will additional training be required? The answers to these questions are highly individualized to each merger and acquisition, and they'll impact how seamless the transition will be. Many people gloss over this stage but then realize the criticality not only in the case of a merger or acquisition but also in the case of a future divestiture.

Finally, the last stage: Execution. This stage is one of the main reasons why some mergers and acquisitions may fall short of expectations. To avoid common issues stemming from poor execution – including disruption of previously effective business processes, impaired customer service, and increase in the cost of the merger or acquisition – we coordinate roles and responsibilities, ensuring that all key tasks are executed. From day one to full integration, we continually monitor to ensure the company is on track to meet its initially defined objectives.

The risks and benefits of a merger or acquisition

I'll be candid: Without a solid foundation through adequate preparation, a merger or acquisition is set up to fail. This risk can be higher for startups and small companies, which don't have the resource buffer that some larger firms can fall back on. Large companies may face a different risk, business processes and data may not be aligned with their current state. And yet, according to Economy Watch, an extensively strategized merger or acquisition transaction, beyond increasing the company's size, can yield significant benefits that include:

Improving its strategic position
Entering a new market
Developing new assets
Lowering operational costs
Expanding market influence

For smooth mergers and acquisitions, we recommend a multi-step process so that you can identify and reduce risks, condense your integration timeline, and quickly capture value. Because despite the challenges, not all is lost during a merger or acquisition – and there is much to be gained.

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Elizabeth Gerbel is the CEO and founder of Houston-based E.A.G. Services Inc.

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Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

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Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

No. 1 – Virginia
No. 2 – New York
No. 3 – New Jersey
No. 4 – Washington
No. 5 – Connecticut
No. 6 – Utah
No. 7 – Colorado
No. 8 – Minnesota
No. 9 – Illinois
No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

future focused

By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No. 105 SLB
No. 120 Baker Hughes
No. 125 ConocoPhillips
No. 158 NRG Energy
No. 176 Targa Resources
No. 185 Chevron
No. 195 Halliburton
No. 223 Coterra Energy
No. 229 Waste Management
No. 235 Exxon Mobil
No. 250 Kinder Morgan
No. 257 Quanta Services
No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
No. 285 Sysco
No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
No. 318 Camden Property Trust
No. 333 EOG Resources
No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
No. 401 Crown Castle
No. 408 Phillips 66
No. 500 APA

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