The media wants you to believe $90 oil is breaking the construction industry. I've spent 16 years managing heavy civil contracts in the NYC metro area and I'm telling you it isn't. Here is what actually drives project costs, and fuel isn't high on the list.
The costs that actually determine whether a job makes money or loses it are labor and insurance. Labor is one of the few variable costs a contractor can actually control. It's where project managers earn their keep. Insurance premiums are negotiated well before the first shovel hits the ground. Neither has anything meaningful to do with the price of crude oil trading on a Monday morning.
Material costs are where people assume oil exposure is highest. By the time oil pricing works its way through a steel fabricator or a concrete supplier and reaches the project budget, the connection is so many degrees removed that the difference on a $50 million contract is negligible.
Vendor and Subcontractor costs are locked in at buyout. PO's and vendor contracts get executed before the job starts. Escalation clauses exist precisely because everyone in the industry already knows this argument will come up.
We saw $4 to $5 gasoline during the Iraq War. Public infrastructure jobs got built, private development continued, and money got made. The construction industry didn't collapse then and it won't now. Equipment fuel costs on a typical heavy civil job amount to a rounding error on a capital project budget. The insurance industry will find creative reasons to raise premiums regardless of what oil does, and that is the cost contractors actually lose sleep over.
The one place oil genuinely matters in construction is in petrochemical-derived products like certain coatings, sealants, and specialty applications. Those costs get absorbed, spread across multiple parties, or repriced at the next contract cycle. Investors pricing in a construction industry doomsday because crude hit $90 are reading the wrong cost drivers entirely. The jobs will get built.