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How US Oil Booms & Busts Hit Industrial Production

November 16, 2018

How US Oil Booms & Busts Hit Industrial Production

Fueled by cheap money and by dashed hopes of high oil prices.

Industrial production in October rose 4.1% from a year ago, the Fed Board of Governors reported this morning. This was in the upper portion of the range since 2010. It was powered in part by the blistering oil & gas production boom that followed the Oil Bust of 2015 and 2016.

This chart shows the percent change in industrial production from the same month a year earlier. The red bars – industrial production falling year-over-year – coincide with the recession in the goods-based economy, the transportation recession, and the Oil Bust:

As part of the overall index, manufacturing rose 2.7% from a year ago, utilities 1.7%, and mining, which includes oil & gas extraction, jumped 13.1%. Oil & gas extraction on its own soared 16.5% from a year ago.

On a monthly basis oil & gas extraction edged down a smidgen over the past two months from a spikey record in August, when it had soared 22.9% year-over-year.

The chart below shows the Industrial Production sub-index for crude oil and natural gas extraction. Note the brief effects of Hurricane Katrina when production along the Gulf Coast was shut down, the Financial Crisis when everything came to a standstill, the subsequent fracking boom, the oil bust in 2015 and 2016, and then the renewed boom. Since the trough of the oil bust in September 2016, the index has surged 31.5%:

It has been a wild ride in the oil & gas sector. At the end of 2008 – following the Lehman Moment – everything came to a halt for a couple of months, but then activity rebounded. Starting in 2011, the fracking boom, fueled by waves of new money trying to find a place to go, took off. At the time, oil prices (WTI) ranged from $75 to $113 a barrel. But in July 2014, oil prices began to dive, and in 2015, the oil bust hit production.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Oil Boom Is a Fraud

September 11, 2018

America’s Oil Boom Is a Fraud

PARIS – We promised to end the week with a bang!

You’ll recall that Fed policy always consists of the same three mistakes… 1) Keeping interest rates too low for too long, resulting in too much debt; 2) Raising interest rates to try to gently deflate the debt bubble; and 3) Cutting rates in a panic when stocks fall and the economy goes into recession.

Well, here comes the Big Bang: Mistake #4 – rarely seen, but always regretted.

Mistake #4 is what the feds do when their backs are to the wall… when they’ve run out of Mistakes 1 through 3.

It’s a typical political trade-off. The future is sacrificed for the present. And the welfare of the public is tossed aside to buy money, power, and influence for the elite.

Apocalypse Now!

Every debt expansion ends in a debt contraction. Stocks crash. Jobs are lost. The economy goes into reverse, correcting the mistakes of the previous boom.

Investors see their money entombed. Householders await foreclosures. The authorities scream: Apocalypse Now!

The more the feds falsify price signals in the boom, the more mistakes there are to correct. For example, this week, a report in The New York Times described the big mistake in the shale oil boom.

You’ll recall that it turned America from a big importer of oil to a major exporter… and revived much of the heartland with big fracking projects in woebegone regions of Texas and North Dakota.

The shale oil boom was even credited with having scuttled the oil market, which dropped from a high of around $130 a barrel in mid-2008 to under $30 in late 2016, thanks to so much new supply.

But guess what? The whole boom was fake. It didn’t add to wealth; it subtracted from it. Accumulated losses over the last five years tote to more than $200 billion, with $36 billion lost in the Bakken shale fields in North Dakota alone.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Give Us Another Oil Boom

April 10, 2017

GIVE US ANOTHER OIL BOOM 

Dear Lord, Y’all give us another oil boom…

If there is one sector of the US economy where an Austrian-style Boom-and-Bust bust has taken place, it is the onshore oil industry – though, by extension, other primary resource industries, such as metals and mining and farming have also suffered in the ongoing aftermath of the general commodity bust.

The good news is that the Austrian prescription for how to deal with a such a calamity has also been followed. The weak have ceded control to the strong – whether by bankruptcy, equity dilution, or co-option and takeover. Prices have been allowed to fall; payrolls – alas, for the unfortunate souls involved – have been cut; the more marginal projects have been put in abeyance, while an unrelenting search for greater efficiency has gone so as to reduce the level of the all-important cut-off between profit and loss.

As a result – and even if we do have to offer a caveat that much of what is afoot is also taking place under the baleful influence of over-easy monetary conditions – the industry has not only found a base, but has even begun to expand once more with no bail-outs, TARPs, or other assistance from a government apparatus (which, if anything has been intensely antagonistic to the industry on ideological grounds), saving only the putative enactment of last autumn’s OPEC agreement to limit output elsewhere.

To put this into context, we could perhaps start with a Moody’s report from the middle of last year which summed matters up by declaring that the oil bust was fully comparable with that vast destruction of value which took place during the first great Tech-Telecom mania at the turn of the century.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

VIDEO: John Oliver Urges Us to Wake Up to How Big Oil Is Killing People and Destroying North Dakota

October 12, 2015

VIDEO: John Oliver Urges Us to Wake Up to How Big Oil Is Killing People and Destroying North Dakota

In another informative and funny segment of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver explores what has happened to North Dakota since the starts of its oil boom.

 

‘Blood & Oil’, North Dakota, and dreams not exactly fulfilled

October 5, 2015

‘Blood & Oil’, North Dakota, and dreams not exactly fulfilled

Last week a new television series set amidst the North Dakota oil boom debuted. Blood & Oil tells the story of locals and newcomers striking it rich in The Bakken, an oil formation that has been heralded as containing more oil than Saudi Arabia–a wildly misleading* but understandably alluring slogan.

Based on the first episode we can conclude that this program is not actually a contemporary drama, but rather a period piece–specifically the period when North Dakota was booming from about, say, 2009 to sometime in mid-2014. And, therein lies the story. For Blood & Oil, above all, must be a tragedy of broken dreams if it is to live up to its realism credentials.

We must look beyond the fact that the show is shot in Utah to the substance of the series. When we do, we see the ever-present gambler’s mentality that dominates the American mind. It did not go unnoticed that America was a land of plenty from the very beginning of European settlement. One of the first European explorers and founder of the first permanent English settlement, Capt. John Smith, observed:

And in diverse places that abundance, of fish lying so thick with their heads above the water [that] as for want of nets (our barge driving among them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan, but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with. Neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for small fish had any of us ever seen in any place so swimming in the water…

Even though Smith’s gamble of starting over in the New World got off to a rough start for him and his fellow settlers at Jamestown, those who came after did find the promised riches of land, forests, minerals and animals unimagined in the Europe of that day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Fracking Changed the Economics of Oil Production Around the World

September 7, 2015

How Fracking Changed the Economics of Oil Production Around the World

James Meadway, chief economist at the New Economics Foundation, explains the interrelated economics behind China’s ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash, Middle Eastern oil and US fracking.

The ‘fracking revolution’ has transformed the economics of oil production globally, with the US becoming a bigger producer than Saudi Arabia and – after decades of dependency on oil imports – even being able to export some of its surplus production.

US shale oil is unusual, too, in being privately owned: most of the world’s oil reserves (over 70 percent) are in state hands. Like the North Sea 30 years ago, in a world dominated by state-owned companies and publicly owned reserves, US shale could look like a new frontier for private operators on the search for fat profits.

New technology, high oil prices, and plentiful cheap credit have encouraged the boom. Some $200bn has been borrowed to invest in fracking in the last few years, accounting for 15 percent of the entire $1.3tr US junk bond market. Investors were, in effect, betting on continuing high oil prices making their investments profitable for years to come.

Price Slump

Last year’s slump in prices trashed that calculation. From a mid-year high of $115 per barrel, by the end of 2014 the price per barrel had fallen by more than 40 percent. More than half of US shale rigs have been laid up since October.

The driver, last year, was the behaviour of OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC is a cartel agreement among major oil producers that seeks to manage the international market for oil. With oil prices already plunging over the summer, OPEC could be expected to ease off on production. Restricting supplies should, thanks to the magic of the market, produce a decent increase in the sale price of oil. Instead, with Saudi Arabia taking the lead, OPECdecided to continue production levels. No agreement on restricting output could be reached. Prices slumped.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Where Oil and Politics Mix – NYTimes.com

November 24, 2014

Where Oil and Politics Mix – NYTimes.com.

TIOGA, N.D. — In late June, as black and gold balloons bobbed above black and gold tables with oil-rig centerpieces, the theme song from “Dallas” warmed up the crowd for the “One Million Barrels, One Million Thanks” celebration.

READ PART 1

The Downside of the Boom

North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances. NOV. 22, 2014

The mood was giddy. Halliburton served barbecued crawfish from Louisiana. A commemorative firearms dealer hawked a “one-million barrel” shotgun emblazoned with the slogan “Oil Can!” Mrs. North Dakota, in banner and crown, posed for pictures. The Texas Flying Legends performed an airshow backlit by a leaping flare of burning gas. And Gov. Jack Dalrymple was the featured guest.

Traveling through the “economically struggling” nation, Mr. Dalrymple told the crowd, he encountered many people who asked, “Jack, what the heck are you doing out there in North Dakota?” to create the fastest-growing economy, lowest unemployment rate and (according to one survey) happiest population.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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