The 58 percent plunge in oil prices since June will cause major hardship for many companies in the energy industry.
But that will provide tasty investment opportunities for private equity firms and restructuring specialists, CNBC.com reports.
"You're pretty much in the top half of the first inning in the oil and gas sector," George Koutsonicolis, managing director at Solic Capital Advisors, told CNBC. "Definitely, I expect there to be a pretty significant round of restructuring."
That will include layoffs, cost cutting and capital restructurings, he said.
Exploration and production companies will particularly feel the pain, as shale oil turns unprofitable around $60 to $70 a barrel, experts say.
These companies have financed their operations largely through high-yield debt. Energy companies make up 17.4 percent of the high-yield bond market, up from 12 percent in 2002, according to Citi Research.
"Given the situation we're in, the access to that high-yield debt will be somewhat impeded for some players," Koutsonicolis said. "It's kind of a death spiral for some of these firms."
Meanwhile, a survey of 306 investment professionals by the ConvergEx Group brokerage paints a different picture. A total of 68 percent think oil prices will keep falling.
And an identical percentage believes that if oil slides to a range of $26 to $30 a barrel, global recession is inevitable. The $30 level would represent a 33 percent drop from Thursday afternoon's $44.62 price for U.S. crude.
"The idea behind this question was simple: at some point oil prices aren’t just a nice theoretical tailwind for global economies," Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx, wrote in a commentary.
"Rather, they become a signal that worldwide demand is contracting so quickly that oil prices must quickly decline to reflect that fact."
To be sure, 66 percent of respondents think that oil prices at current levels are positive for the U.S. economy, while only 22 percent think they're negative.
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