US shale industry is on the brink of "survival"
The fall in world prices for black gold, caused by Russia's refusal to reduce production proposed by OPEC and the demarche of Saudi Arabia, has put shale companies in the United States on the brink of survival.
The economic publication Financial Times sounded the alarm instantly. Yesterday, it was suggested on its pages that the situation on the exchanges where the shares of "shale" oil companies in the United States are placed is "critically close to economic distress." We are talking about a fall to the pre-default level of bonds in the amount of about 110 billion dollars, which is at least 12% of the total number of securities issued by American oil and gas companies. Callon Petroleum and Oasis Petroleum, Continental Resources and Occidental Petroleum, Chesapeake Energy and Parsley - this is not a complete list of enterprises in the sector whose bonds literally lost half or more of their value in a day.
According to the Financial Times, the volume of bad debts of the “shale” almost instantly increased to an alarming amount of $ 175 billion and has a tendency to increase. Having gained huge amounts of loans, the “shale” industry has recently begun to cause deep disappointment to many investors who expected fast and stable profits from it. According to American financial analysts, the country's banking sector is increasingly refusing oil companies new loans - especially after, according to reports, last year they were forced to write off at least a billion "bad" debts.
Bloomberg analysts are even more categorical, calling what is happening "blood bath", "natural disaster" and "killing the shale sector." According to their forecasts, if the price of a barrel of “black gold” lasts below the level of $ 30 for any long time, oil companies will not even have to pay the rent of the areas where they are producing, not to mention dividends and other things. At the same time, many experts, analyzing the current situation, accuse the “shale workers” themselves, who are about to break out, who were infinitely increasing their production and did not think about what this could ultimately lead to.
For example, Pickering Energy Partners asset manager Dan Pickering believes that the industry “shot itself on its own foot”, taking OPEC countries to reduce their exports as an incentive to pump more and more barrels from the bowels of the earth. Now its representatives have every chance of being at a trough. However, not only they ... Already not political, but economic analysts today reflect on the fact that Donald Trump, perhaps, was in a hurry to thank Riyadh and Moscow "for cheap gasoline." Some of them predict that if the barrel by the time of the presidential election in the United States does not climb above the current $ 35, the current owner of the White House can completely forget about any chance of victory in the country's oil-producing regions (in Texas).
Well, perhaps the decision not to reduce the level of “black gold” production made by our country and already criticized several times both inside it and outside Russia was not so rash as it might seem at first glance.
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