IC Article on Shale and Reader Response By Alex Newman , 26 April 2016
One of the many casualties of the oil price collapse has been US shale. The technological progress which paved the way for the country’s energy revolution cannot be destroyed, but the last two years have been devastating for what is still a young industry.
Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than the enormous drop off in onshore rig counts for the major shale basins, based on data from oil services firm Baker Hughes. As the graph shows below, the number of rigs has cratered by more than three-quarters since the end of 2014, with many unconventional producers already in bankruptcy courts, and others locked out of capital markets and facing an uncertain future.
This has serious implications. The Energy Information Association (EIA) is forecasting for non-OPEC production (predominantly US-based) to decline by 400,000 barrels a day this year and by a further 500,000 barrels in 2017. This is a swift reversal from the 1.5 million barrel increase in 2015, most of which was also attributable to the US. As the rig count appears to still be falling, a further downgrade in shale production could be damaging for future supply.
Shale has a trump card. Between 2013 and 2015, the average wellhead break-even price declined by 40 per cent for the main US plays. Of course, some of this will be down to lower pricing from contractors and oil services companies, and break-even prices of $40 are hardly enticing given current spot prices. But if technological advancements can continue amid an improvement in prices this year, 2016 may not finish as terribly as it has started for shale producers. How quickly any of this happens, will be a key determinant in the volatility of oil prices in the next 12 months. Ends
Alex
According to the weekly US Field Production data, in the 45 weeks since June 2015 US output has fallen by 657,000 bpd. Extrapolating this to an annual figure on a straight line basis would give an annual 759,000 bpd decline. The rate of decline is expected to accelerate over the next year as there are few reserve wells left to stem the inexorable impact of the high shale well depletion rates.
Much has been made of the shale producers' claims of $40 production costs. This cannot be correct. The average price of oil for the past year has been slightly under $50 per barrel. The state of shale producers' balance sheets clearly demonstrates that prices of nearer $70 per barrel if not $100 per barrel are required to make shale production economic.
Shale producers have also claimed to have large numbers of reserve pre-drilled wells. Clearly they had a few but recent production falls demonstrate that their reserve wells are nowhere near enough to maintain production levels against such a dramatic fall in rig count.
Shale producers also claim that they will increase drilling again as soon as the oil price goes back up. They may well do this, but rig count and output combined charts (available online) show that over the past decade there is a 1.5 to 2 year lag from rig count increases to an equivalent increases in output.
Then there are oil major chiefs predicting low oil prices for years to come. Clearly they want to encourage high cost producers to throw in the towel as soon as possible, predicting a sharp oil price recovery would only encourage high cost producers to hang on in there.
There is a lot of misleading noise out there. A close look at the hard facts leads to a clear conclusion, a supply and demand balance towards the end of this year with a severe oil supply shortage lasting for several years thereafter.