The energy industry is witnessing the most disruptive shake-up since a wave of takeovers in the late 1990s created the super-majors such as ExxonMobil and BP. The good news is that the changes are largely positive, creating an industry that is better positioned to solve the world's great energy challenges.

Here's the bigger picture. The neat, familiar defining lines separating different types of energy companies are becoming blurred. When I entered this industry three decades ago, those lines were crystal clear. National Oil Companies (NOCs) were the state-owned firms in charge of domestic assets, such as Abu Dhabi National Oil Company or Petronas in Malaysia. They stayed at home.

Then you had International Oil Companies (IOCs) - private sector operators loosely grouped into major energy companies such as Exxon, and smaller independent production companies such as Maersk Oil. Service companies sold technical services and provided equipment such as drilling rigs, while trading companies bought and sold end products like crude oil and diesel.

Today many NOCs are increasingly acting like IOCs, expanding beyond their national boundaries and competing for assets overseas - the arrival of Statoil, China National Petroleum Corporation and Korea National Oil Corporation into the Gulf's upstream energy sector are three good examples. For some NOCs the motive is commercial, while for others it's all about security of future supply for their home countries.

Meanwhile, some super-majors are operating more like super project managers. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, IOCs controlled the identification, extraction and productization of three quarters of global hydrocarbon reserves. Today, state-owned NOCs control roughly three quarters of the world's reserves, leaving super majors on occasion to accept the role of glorified service providers. If you study many of the big energy concession deals signed these days, governments pay IOCs a fee to get oil and gas out of the ground, but the IOCs don't own the assets and cannot book them on their balance sheets.

Iraq's recent contracts are a good example.

If NOCs are challenging the super-majors from above, service companies are encroaching into their space from below. To an extent, the IOCs only have themselves to blame for from the late-1980s to the late 1990s as oil prices fell to $ 10 a barrel, major operators downsized and outsourced much of their technical work to service companies such as Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes.

Today those services companies have grown so big and so capable that they are beginning to do deals directly with resource-owning countries. We see a good example of this in Mexico, where a joint venture between Schlumberger and Petrofac - two service companies - has won major development contracts from the state monopoly NOC Pemex.

Some commentators are already writing the obituaries of the super-majors, but I think this is extremely premature.

"The super-major model is broken," said Investec analyst Stuart Joyner earlier this year, quoted by Bloomberg News. This comment was spurred in response to BP's decision to streamline operations, including the sale of billions of dollars of Russian assets.

I would argue that super-majors still have an essential part to play in developing new discoveries that require massive capital expenditure - large reserves that are climatically and geologically challenging such as very deep water close to the Arctic Circle. They also have a pivotal role in the Middle East, where successful partnerships with NOCs built over decades will not simply be discarded overnight.

Perhaps the most interesting space for change is just below the super-majors, where a growing number of smaller, independent operators are active. In some ways, these are the modern equivalent of the "ma & pa" oil speculators who dug an oil well on their ranch in Texas a century ago. The North Sea is a great example of where such companies work very effectively. As previously discovered fields began reaching maturity in the 1990s, many of them ceased to be commercially attractive to the handful of major British and Norwegian companies who pioneered that area.

Today you have dozens of small operators in the North Sea, many of them listed on junior stock exchanges in London and Oslo and founded by entrepreneurs who cut their teeth with the supermajors and service companies in the early days of their careers.

This is significant.

Individually their contributions may be small, but collectively they are extending the productive life and recovery factor of the entire North-Sea basin. Twenty years ago, the rule of thumb in the North Sea was that no field was economically viable if it held less than 60 million barrels. Today the cut-off point is nearer three million barrels. We're also seeing this entrepreneurial trend in parts of Asia, and it's beginning to emerge in the Middle East with companies such as Kuwait Energy Company, Dragon Oil and DNO although it is still very much in its infancy.

Collaboration is key to this new model, and companies such as Senergy are an important cog in the wheel. Senergy is an energy services company with a series of global knowledge hubs, including in the UAE, employing hundreds of people dispersed around the global energy centers with high-end knowledge skills focused on upstream exploration, production and project management. The industry faces a severe shortage of these talented engineers, geoscientists and project managers, and there's no way that smaller exploration and production companies can retain this full capability in-house.

This new energy ecosystem is still evolving. NOCs, super majors, independents and service companies are increasingly entrepreneurial, adapting to the changing demands of the industry.

This is why I say the current shake-up is good news for the industry. There can be no doubt that the world faces a significant challenge in the coming decades to meet demand for energy, which is still increasing every year despite the volatile economic environment. The more dynamic, flexible and collaborative the industry becomes, the better position it will be in to help keep the lights on.

— James McCallum is

CEO of Senergy.