"New gold rush in shale" will benefit NTQ15 Mar 2022 07:15
From today's Times:
Https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/america-fires-starting-gun-on-new-gold-rush-in-shale-hws6zcv0h
"America fires starting gun on new gold rush in shale
As Covid-19 swept the world, America’s shale industry was brought to its knees. An unprecedented slump in demand drove the country’s oil price below zero for the first time on record. What followed was a steep, protracted road to recovery — and then Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, with the conflict having driven the price of crude to its highest levels since 2008, producers that only two years ago had been pushed to the brink are back on the march.
According to John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, an investment firm, the “boom times” are about to return for those producers. Oil’s rapid ascent is “just too much of an allure not to capitalise on. I don’t think that it’s unfair to say, if these prices last even much longer, that there will be a gold rush.” Last week West Texas Intermediate, the American benchmark oil price that stooped as low as minus $40 in April 2020, hit $129. The last shale boom carried America’s oil output to a peak of 12.9m barrels per day before the pandemic. Covid suppressed production to less than 11m barrels, but this has since recovered to 11.7m. The Baker Hughes rig count, a key barometer of activity across America’s oil sector, reported that 663 rigs were in operation as of Friday, up 261 on the same point in 2021.
With US inflation at a four-decade high, Biden has vowed to throw all he can at mitigating the cost of surging oil prices for consumers. “This is not a ‘drill, baby, drill,’ administration, that’s for sure,” Kilduff said. It is, nevertheless, one that faces the ballot box in November. Officials would “bite the bullet”, he predicted, and do everything possible “in the short term” to boost oil production and get prices down."
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