From Wolf Richter, wolfstreet.com:
Never before has drilling for oil plunged this far this fast.
The word “boom” can never be thought of as a stand-alone concept that everyone loves, particularly governments because they get to rake in the big bucks. It’s always attached to its miserable twin that no one wants to see, the “bust.” They come invariably in cycles, one after the other. You can’t have one without the other. It’s just a question of time. And in the world of fracking, it’s no different.
The fracking-for-oil boom started in 2005, collapsed by 60% during the Financial Crisis when money ran out, but got going in earnest after the Fed had begun spreading its newly created money around the land. From the trough in May 2009 to its peak in October 2014, rigs drilling for oil soared from 180 to 1,609: multiplied by a factor of 9 in five years! And oil production soared, to reach 9.2 million barrels a day in January.
That’s what real booms look like. They’re fed by limitless low-cost money – exuberant investors that buy the riskiest IPOs, junk bonds, leveraged loans, and CLOs usually indirectly without knowing it via their bond funds, stock funds, leveraged-loan funds, by being part of a public pension system that invests in private equity firms that invest in the boom…. You get the idea.
That’s how much of the American shale-oil revolution was funded.
Production soared for five years and eventually outpaced sluggish demand. Crap happened on the world scene, and suddenly the fracking boom, the biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind, turned into a terrible bust.
On the drilling side, the bust began in mid-October last year, after the price had been plunging for over three months. At that time, 1,609 rigs were actively drilling for oil, according to Baker Hughes. Since then, week after week, drillers were idling rigs as fast as they could.
In the latest reporting week, drillers idled another 84 rigs, the second biggest weekly cut ever, after idling 94 rigs two weeks earlier. Only 1056 rigs are still drilling for oil, down 443 for the seven reporting weeks so far this year and down 553 – or 34%! – from the peak in October.
http://wolfstreet.com/2015/02/13/the-fracking-bust-drilling-for-oil-plunged-34-since-october/
To continue reading: The Sudden Collapse of Fracking
