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The Great American Shale-Oil Bust Turns into Massacre
The Great American Shale-Oil Bust Turns into Massacre
Shares of shale oil drillers collapsed by 25%-50% today. Their bonds got massacred. Saudi-Russia price-war strategy appears successful in wiping out investors in the US shale-oil sector.
It was so chaotic and brutal in the crude oil market today that the EIA, which is part of the US Department of Energy, emailed out a statement that it would have to delay its monthly Energy Outlook to figure in all the chaos: “We have delayed the release of the Short-Term Energy Outlook to allow time to incorporate recent global oil market events. The outlook will now be released Wednesday, March 11, at 9:00 a.m.”
Shares of Occidental Petroleum, which is heavily involved in US shale oil and gas, collapsed by 53% today to $12.51. They’re down 85% since October 2018, when phase two of the Great American Oil Bust set in, with phase one having commenced in July 2014:
Oxy’s bonds – those that even traded – collapsed today. For example, this $750 million 30-year senior unsecured bond, with a coupon interest of 4.1%, closed on Friday at 92.5 cents on the dollar. Like many bonds, they don’t trade much, but are stuck in bond funds or held by institutional investors, and it’s hard to sell them because there are not many buyers.
Today, there are only two trades listed on FINRA-Morningstar, but they were big trades, with institutional investors unloading them for whatever they could get. So the price today collapsed by 34% from the close on Friday, and by 39% over the past three trading days, to 61 cents on the dollar:
Shares of Chesapeake Energy, a former shale oil-and-gas giant, particularly focused on natural gas, plunged 28% today, from nearly nothing to almost nothing, closing at $0.16. The company has been dilly-dallying around near the bankruptcy-filing counter for years, without having filed yet, as investors continued to feed it fresh cash and agreed to haircuts and restructure its debts. But that fresh-cash option appears to be off the table.
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The Dark Side Of The Shale Bust
The Dark Side Of The Shale Bust
The fallout of the collapse in oil prices has a lot of side effects apart from the decline of rig counts and oil flows.
Oil production in North Dakota has exploded over the last five years, from negligible levels before 2010 to well over a million barrels per day, making North Dakota the second largest oil producing state in the country.
But the bust is leaving towns like Williston, North Dakota stretched extremely thin as it tries to deal with the aftermath. Williston is coping with $300 million in debt after having leveraged itself to buildup infrastructure to deal with the swelling of people and equipment heading for the oil patch. Roads, schools, housing, water-treatment plants and more all cost the city a lot of money, expected to be paid off with revenues from oil production that are suddenly not flowing into local and state coffers the way they once were.
Williams County Commissioner Dan Kalil says that a lot of unemployed people who flocked to North Dakota are left in the wake of the bust, something that the local government has to sort out. “We attracted everyone who had failed in Sacramento, everyone who failed in Phoenix, everyone who failed in Las Vegas, everybody who had failed in Houston, everyone who failed in Florida,” Kalil said in a June 3 interview with WHQR.org. “And they all came here with unrealistic expectations. And it’s really frustrating for those of us left to clean up the mess.”
Output is still only slightly off its all-time high of 1.2 million barrels per day, which it hit in December 2014. But more declines are expected with drillers pulling their rigs and crews from the field. Rig counts in North Dakota have fallen to just 76, as of June 12, far below the 130 or so that state officials believe is needed to keep production flat.
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Three Reasons Why US Shale Isn’t Going Anywhere
Three Reasons Why US Shale Isn’t Going Anywhere
Have you ever noticed that during extreme economic cycles, when trends are roaring on the upside, or conversely crashing back down to earth, there often appears an air of extremism in news headlines? Take America’s most recent shale oil boom, and bust, for example. On the way up, you may have seen – Why OPEC Could Be Dead in 10 Years. Conversely, now you may have read, Why It Might Be ‘Game Over For The Fracking Boom’.
In the end, the answer lies somewhere in-between. OPEC, although often plagued with internal discord, will still remain the global defacto 900-pound gorilla of crude, and US producers will continue to find ways to crack shale rock cheaper and more efficiently, immunizing themselves to nail-biting commodity roller coaster dips like what was just experienced. And in 2008 (-55%). And in 2001 (-32%). And in 1998 (-38%)….
BP, in its recently-released “Energy Outlook 2035”, predicts OPEC’s market share will return to approximately 40 percent of global demand within 15 years, up from 33 percent today, which is what all this fuss is about anyway.
Related: No Real Oil Price Relief Until Q3
Here are 3 reasons why America’s shale will continue to produce going forward:
1. Oil companies, both large and small, have seen what is possible.
In 2004, Texas oilman George Mitchell made hydraulic fracture stimulation commercially viable by unlocking the right combination of water pressure and lubricants to allow oil and gas to predictably flow from dense shale to the wellbore. A decade ago, producers believed shale held vast oil and gas resources, but to what extent they could be developed had not been determined. Until now.
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