DALLAS—It ain’t over till it’s over, Yogi Berra once said. And the U.S. shale crowd is definitely still cheering.

However, as Bill Marko, managing director of Jefferies LLC, sees it times are tough, but not all doom and gloom for the U.S.

The ingenuity of E&P companies and remarkable strength of the A&D market in the Permian Basin have rapidly lowered the threshold of pain first experienced by crashing crude prices.

The good news, Marko said, is that “we went from fast to let’s be efficient—$50 is the new $80.”

Marko, who spoke at Hart Energy’s A&D Strategies and Opportunities conference in early September, said companies have quickly learned how to survive, and in some cases prosper in a low oil price environment—something many deemed implausible before the downturn.

In particular, the majors are finding it hard to compete with the independents because of their speed and ability to focus on particular areas, Marko said.

“Part of it is capital cost reduction and part of that has come out of the hides of the service companies and part of it is just smarter business,” he said.

This newfound efficiency is set to make the U.S. an even stronger producer and has already put the country in a position to upset Saudi Arabia’s control on the global oil market, Marko said.

He pointed to the slower-than-expected rollover in oil production in the U.S. as an example.

After years of growth, U.S oil production is projected to decrease this year to 8.8 million barrels per day (MMbbl/d) from an average of 9.4 MMbbl/d in 2015, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“I think [Saudi Arabia] thought after six months the U.S. would collapse,” Marko said, “and because of the efficiency we didn’t.”

Instead, the U.S. has seized the title as the world’s swing producer from OPEC due to its ability to “turn on a dime,” he said. U.S. oil producers are able to respond to oil prices more quickly than Saudi Arabia largely because of efficiency gains, and “we’re just in the first or second inning of that.”

What more proof is there than the line around the Permian Basin, where companies are spending so much for entry into the stacked-play.

From July through early September, the Southern Delaware alone saw $6.2 billion in deals from companies such as EOG Resources, Diamondback Energy, PDC Energy and Mark Papa’s Silver Run Acquisition Corp.

“If you grind efficiency into all the oil in place and all the benches in the Permian, it’s going to be an unbelievable play and we’re just in the very early days of that,” Marko said.

Companies not lucky enough to already own Delaware acreage need to figure out how to get there—and fast, he added.

“I don’t know how you can be an international oil company without having a position [in the Delaware Basin] because of the oil price, the number of benches and what technology will do,” he said.

Marko’s macro view is that North America will continue to dominate the business for the next several decades with the Permian becoming “the most important producing arena in the world.”

North America is the place to be compared to anywhere else due to infrastructure, technologies, efficiencies and land ownership. “Just put it all together and it’s a perfect combination,” Marko said.

Emily Moser can be reached at emoser@hartenergy.com.