The renewable energy revolution that many have been seen as a threat for the oil and gas industry will actually benefit one significant segment of it: Big Oil. That’s what Goldman Sachs’s head of natural resources research in the EMEA region told CNBC this week.

The reason for the counterintuitive conclusion has everything to do with size: the same factor that has made Big Oil the most likely winner in the shale patch as long as oil and gas prices don’t slump too low.

“The decarbonization push, the push from the market to adapt to climate change, is tightening the financial conditions in the sector so much that we’re recreating the barriers to entry and we’re reconsolidating the market structure we lost at the beginning of the 2000s,” Michele della Vigna said.