The oil & gas industry is primarily driven by the free market forces of supply and demand. Governmnent taxation, regulation, tariffs, and limits on exploration interfere with free market forces in some ways and impede free market forces. But it's basically a world-wide free market system, with one big exception: OPEC is a foreign cartel that restricts output to maintain higher prices. Right now OPEC has very little excess capacity so the cartel is not having any significant effect on prices, but they did cause higher prices 3-5 years ago.