With one quick drop in the price of oil, the shale oil boom is
officially bust. In less than a week, 61 oil rigs across the United
States closed up shop, according to the most recent rig count from Baker Hughes. The U.S. has 1,750 oil rigs still hunting for new oil wells, but that number is expected to fall by another 400 rigs by the time spring rolls around.
The whole episode is a wake-up call about just how much of a fairy
tale North America’s oil boom really was. It was a fairy tale with real
drills, sure — and since it was exempt from the Clean Air and Clean
Water acts, it will continue to have real consequences for the people
living near it. But when it costs Saudi Arabia $10 to get a barrel of oil
and it costs shale oil operations around $65 to make that same barrel,
it should have been obvious that America was only a titan of oil
production because another country was letting us be.
The U.S. got the excitement of overtaking Saudi Arabia and becoming
the biggest producer of oil in the world for a few months this summer.
Then Saudi Arabia did what it always had the power to do and raised its
oil output so that prices fell.
“Those who are producing the most expensive oil — the rationale and
the rules of the market say that they should be the first to pull or
reduce their production,” Suhail Al Mazrouei, oil minister for the
United Arab Emirates, told reporters recently,
sounding more than a little like an Econ 101 professor. “If the price
is right for them to produce, then fine, let them produce.”
That price — which was $110 per barrel this summer, and $80 three
months ago — is now hovering at $46. Goldman Sachs estimates that it
will drop to $40 in a few months, since it will take a while for
production to slow down and adjust to the new pricing. the United
States has cut 10 percent of its oil exploration, and Canada has cut
back 25 percent
Since late November, the United States has cut 10 percent of its oil exploration,
and Canada has cut back 25 percent. If this continues, expect the oil
boom towns of Alberta, Texas, North Dakota, and Colorado to start
looking more like ghost towns.
When are prices likely to rise again? Goldman Sachs estimates they’ll
begin rebounding at the end of 2015. Others warn that the situation
could be more like the oil price drop of 1986, which lasted about five years.
All of which means that TransCanada may well find itself delighted
that protesters stopped it from building a big, expensive pipeline to
get now-unprofitable tar-sands oil to market. I wouldn’t count on that
one, though. Source: Grist
CORRECTION: This post originally misidentified
the nature of the rig count referred to in the first paragraph. It is a
measure of the number of rigs looking for oil, rather than the number of
wells that are in production — so the drop is in exploration, rather
than total production. Grist regrets the error, and has sentenced the
writer to hard time served reading the rotary rig count FAQ page.
Source: Grist
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