Oil prices and Naimi chill the Houston air

The great and the good of the industry gathered in Texas for IHS Ceraweek. It wasn’t a happy affair

Houston's stormy skies proved an apt setting for a gloomy IHS CeraWeek conference, an annual gathering of oil executives, analysts and journalists. Few of them saw much of a silver lining for the industry any time soon. If conference-goers last year underestimated the depth of the price slump to come, this time it was different. You could barely walk through a lobby or sit through a speech this year without hearing new prophecies of doom. "Some people call it a cycle,” Enterprise Products Partners’ chief executive Jim Teague told the conference. “I call it pure hell.”“It's going to be really, really ugly to get through this valley," said Mark Papa, former chief executive at shale driller EOG