The aim of this paper is to show that in the last thirty years the world oil industry has gone through three successive stages in the evolution of marginal production costs, corresponding to three different organizations of the market: the majors order (1929-73), the OPEC order (1974-86) and the consumer-countries order (1986 to the present), These orders all differ as far as organization of competition or the conditions of oil surplus distribution are concerned, By provoking a break with industrial structure and the established balance of power between actors, it seems that each successive reversal in the evolution of the production costs＇ trend results in an oil crisis, and subsequent backlash, and that these change the organizational dynamics of the industry, The oil crisis of 1973, which announced the end of the majors order and its replacement by OPEC, thus occurred at the moment when the production costs＇ trend went through a transition from a decreasing stage to a growth stage, A new change in this trend in the mid-1980s, from a growth stage to a decreasing one, was the cause of the 1986 backlash which led to the replacement of the OPEC order by that of the consumer-countries order.