Wall Street knows all about sagging oil and gas prices. Main Street knows all about sagging gasoline and diesel prices. Far too many press releases come across my desk with words like “liquidity enhancement” and “reorganization” in them. An oil industry vendor confided to me the other day that flash numbers sent up by accounting show his firm did worse in 2015 than the awful Great Recession year of 2008.

Something major seems to be happening in the energy space, but what? Midstream struggles to keep up.

The blame may go to that phenomenon known as “creative destruction,” more properly known as Schumpeter’s gale by economists, crediting Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter.

The economist wrote of the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

Excellent examples underway now in another industry are the ride-sharing services, Uber and Lyft. These firms employ cell phones and the Internet to connect directly to people who need a ride someplace. That represents a major threat to the established, government-regulated taxi business that has been around for years. Their success has come by employing technology to offer a better product at a lower price.

Ask my taxi-phobic wife about Uber. Only she can properly relate the horror of riding in a smelly cab operated by a driver who roared up New York’s Eighth Avenue at close to 100 miles per hour, all to stay in front of a siren-wailing fi re truck. And for this convenience she had to pay an exorbitant fare.

Never again, she vowed, no cabs for me. I would rather walk. So it took considerable urging on my part to get her to try Uber for a recent trip to the airport. She relayed afterward how a pleasant, college-age woman arrived in a matter of minutes in a spotless Toyota Prius and drove conservatively through heavy traffic as they enjoyed a stimulating conversation. And the fare was about two-thirds of what a city-regulated taxi driver would demand. Guess who she’ll call on next time she needs a ride?

The oil and gas business may be undergoing something similar right now, according to Donald L. Luskin, chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC. He wrote in a recent op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that “fracking is to the global oil industry what Uber is to taxi medallion owners: great for consumers who enjoy the sudden abundance, deadly for incumbents whose business models were built on exploiting scarcity. In the short term, the misery visited on oil incumbents is spilling over into the economy generally.”

The industry has been through this before, long before our careers began. Daniel Yergin points out in his award-winning book, “The Prize,” how the industry focused on producing kerosene in its early days. Thomas Edison’s light bulb in 1879 was a Schumpeter’s-gale threat. Maybe the oil age was to end before the 20th century began?

Separately, creative destruction was underway in another business as the automobile replaced the horse. “The ‘new light’ had given way to the ‘new fuel,’” Yergin noted in the book. The industry’s greatest years were ahead.

How the current situation plays out remains to be seen. One hopes that the result for the industry involves a euphemism for creative destruction: “disruptive innovation.” The old order of oil and gas may be replaced with an innovative business model that has yet to emerge.

But whatever happens, midstream assets will continue to be in demand to move production to market. We should all keep that in mind—and be ready for change.

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