by ROCKMAN » Sat 13 May 2017, 15:57:57
tita - "Producers don't have the money themselves for this, so this is due to heavy investment to pubcos." You have me confused a bit. Virtually all the shale drillers/producers are pubcos...publicly traded oil companies.
Also: "Producers don't have the money themselves for this, so this is due to heavy investment to pubcos". No money? US oil companies have a current GROSS REVENUE of around $135 BILLION per year. Granted they have to pay royalties, taxes, operating expenses as well as service debt. But that still leaves a substantial amount of net income. ExxonMobil had a NET INCOME of $7.2 BILLION in 2016. Granted not as good as $16.2 BILLION in 2015 but still a lot of change. Even Chesapeake, the poster child of everything that went wrong with the shales, had a net income of -4.4 BILLION in 2016. And yet it spent $1.6 BILLION last year and plans to spend $2+ BILLION in 2017. And investors aren't loaning them money...the banks are. They may be running a negative cash flow but that doesn't mean the company doesn't have an underlying value the money lenders can use to justify financing the company. And it is in worst shape then most companies today. From last August:
"Yesterday Chesapeake Energy, the second largest natural gas producer in the United States (and the largest Marcellus producer, by far) issued three press releases. The first release said the company is working to obtain a five-year bank loan for a staggering $1 billion. The second two releases outlined what they will do with that money: pay off older IOUs. We also spotted commentary on the company’s $1B plan. One analyst predicts Chesapeake is heading for a pre-packaged bankruptcy, similar to what other o&g companies have done, and this massive loan/debt repayment is proof. Another analyst says Chessy CEO Doug Lawler is brilliant and that this move will strengthen Chessy’s stock in the long-term and make the company more solvent. Which one is right? They both can’t be right…"
And so far no signs a CHK filing bankruptcy. Honestly some folks are running around screaming the oil patch is destroyed like their hair is on fire. LOL. But I suspect many of them are either not old enough to have been around in the early 80's or are too lazy to do some web searching. Yeah, the oil patch just took a hard hit. But trust me: this wasn't much compared to the outright slaughter we went thru in the late 70's bust. Like when the rig count fell from 4,500 (compared to the recent peak of only 2,000) to 700. And the same oil patch that had to deal with oil prices less than $20 in 1998.
The same oil patch that since those times almost increased US oil production to the record level it reached over 45 years ago. The Rockman isn't saying there's any chance for history to repeat itself to such extremes. But before you start writing our epitaph you might want to wait until the situation degrades to a level worse then where we were in 1986. LOL. So some might want to back off that massive doom & gloom...they are starting to sound like "girlie men" (said with a heavy German accent.) Seriously: these are the thoughts of a petroleum geologist that had to drive a Yellow Cab in Houston during the 80's in order to scape by. Most here haven't been in the middle of a serious train wreck...the Rockman has. And knew of two geologists that committed suicide back then. Haven't heard of any yet these days but a tad suspicious about Aubrey McClendon's "auto accident". So far this has just been a very serious fender bender proven by the fact that inflation adjusted oil prices are still about 25% higher then the historic average. And twice as high as it was 18 years ago.