Shale Oil Drillers Ask OFS Providers to Slash Prices at Least 25%
If you operate a company that sells a product (particularly a commodity product) you only have two ways of making a profit: Sell the product for more money or cut expenses (or both). For oil drillers, the price of the product sold is pretty much fixed. Some drillers have “hedged” their production, pre-selling future production at a specific price. But many don’t hedge. And hedging contracts typically don’t extend beyond a year. In the case of oil, the world market sets the price, and the price this week is about half of what it was last week. That means most shale oil drillers won’t make a profit–unless they can trim costs. One of the ways drillers are attempting to cut costs is by asking the companies that do the actual drilling and perform services for them (oilfield services companies, or OFS) to cut the rate they charge.
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Back in the day, your humble editor, Jim Willis, worked first an intern and later as a paid staffer in the Ronald Reagan White House. Very cool experience for a hick kid from Upstate New York. After a stint at the White House, Jim stayed in D.C. and went to work on Capitol Hill, working for Congresswoman Helen Bentley (Republican from Maryland). One of Bentley’s favorite issues was to fight against the dumping of machine tools by foreign companies on the American market. Companies in other counties would sell machine tools here more cheaply than it cost them to make, using backdoor funding from their governments to make up the difference. Eventually, our machine tool companies couldn’t compete and would go out of business, leaving the market wide open to foreign competitors, at which time they would jack their prices up.
The price of natural gas in various locations, including the NYMEX futures price, has been inching up over the past few days. Yesterday the NYMEX price closed down slightly, at $1.88/Mcf. But that’s better than the $1.60 territory where it’s been bumping around. The price is inching up because of the Saudi-Russian oil price war. Most traders figure there will be less shale oil drilling in the U.S., and because of it, less associated natural gas production from places like the Permian (and Bakken). Which in turn means less supply, driving up prices for natgas. How long will prices go up? And, how high will the price go? We spotted one trader’s take on where he believes prices are heading.
We continue our coverage of the historic (in a bad way) oil price war started by Russia against American shale drillers, now complicated by Saudi Arabia as they have turned the spigot wide open to pump as much oil as they can, resulting in a price crash for oil. From time to time we’ve featured comments and reports issued by IHS Markit, a global analytics company that tracks data in the oil and gas industry. Yesterday we received IHS Markit’s “key conclusions” from the latest assessment of oil markets. It’s called, “Oil Markets and Industry Brace for Crash as Supply Floodgates Open.” We think it’s about the best summation of what has happened (so far), and what’s likely to happen in the near- and medium-term.
Something truly historic happened yesterday. And there is a tie-in to the Marcellus/Utica (which we’ll get to, stick with us). At its core, what happened yesterday is pretty simple to grasp, although most media stories you read either miss it or bury it. Last Friday Russia told OPEC it would no longer participate in coordinating production cuts with Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries in an effort to boost the price of oil (see 
Over 700 people gathered yesterday in Columbus, OH for OOGA’s (Ohio Oil & Gas Association) 73rd Annual Meeting. Industry leaders soberly assessed the state of current affairs. According to OOGA president Matt Hammond, the industry may have to downsize for a while. Jeff Fisher, CEO of Ascent Resources, agreed. Hammond said, “it’s just going to look a little bit different in the next few years” before the price of gas rebounds. The sentiment was clearly what we’ve been preaching: Expect lower for longer when it comes to gas prices.
A great many things affect the price of oil and natural gas–weather, economic conditions, supply/demand balance, sunspots. Can a human virus affect the O&G industry too? It seems the answer to that is, YES. We’ve resisted bringing you blow-by-blow the daily coronavirus tripe peddled by mainstream media in their attempt to harm the American “Trump” economy. But we can’t ignore how media-generated panic is affecting world markets–and (now) the oil and gas industry, including the industry here in the U.S.
More obsessing and hand-wringing over the low price of natural gas (we can’t help it!). Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published a post on Friday that points out the NYMEX price of natural gas has hit its lowest level for a February day in the past 20 years, closing at $1.77/MMBtu on Feb. 10 (up slightly since then). EIA also points out these are the lowest absolute prices (for any day in any month) we’ve seen in the past four years–since the price crash of 2016. Again, the price crash is happening in February! Yuck.
Gasmageddon, as this current low natural gas price climate is being called, is getting worse. Based on the latest weather models (the natgas market has some of the best long-range weather forecasting in the world), gas prices have crashed and are burning (pun intended). Yesterday the NYMEX futures price closed at $1.77–in the dead of winter! Spot prices for gas bought and sold in the northeast lead the loss in value. A Raymond James survey of energy executives found most execs believe we will exit 2020 with the price of gas in the $1.50-$2.00 range, and that gas will not go above an average of $2.50 this year. Although we now use 50% more natgas than just 10 years ago, prices remain stubbornly low. Why?
If there’s any silver lining to the ongoing low price for natural gas (NYMEX price closed at $1.86 yesterday), it is that gas-fired power generation kicks in with more demand, which will ultimately cause the price to rise–or at least not fall any further. Electric generation is a critically important market for natural gas. We spotted a couple of interesting articles. The first, from Platts, outlines the relationship of low gas prices to more switching from coal to gas. Platts says if gas stays under $2/Mcf, “power burn could see significant upside risk.” The other article, from Rigzone, says natgas will generate nearly 40% of all electricity in 2020–double what it generated just 10 years ago.
Natural gas is one of those commodities that economists consider as close to a “pure” commodity as one can get. Meaning the classic supply and demand curve rules. When you get more supply than you have in demand, the price goes down–along a predictable curve. In the natural gas world, supply signals come from a couple of different numbers. One is overall production. Another is storage–how much natural gas is sitting, unused, in underground storage, put there during summer “injection season” so it can be used during the winter “withdrawal season.” The bad news (for prices) is that with relatively mild temperatures this winter, we are at near-record high storage levels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
How many times over the years has MDN made this observation, using words along these lines: Cabot Oil & Gas is the only Marcellus drilling we know that can spin gold out of straw. Meaning they make money even at some of the lowest natural gas prices in the country, found in northeastern PA. A recent post by an energy investment advisor examines Cabot’s unique ability to make money at low prices.
Yes, 2019 was a tough year here in the Marcellus/Utica shale due to low natural gas prices drillers received for their gas. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says the average spot price for natural gas at the benchmark Henry Hub was $2.57 per million BTUs (MMBtu) in 2019. But the news gets worse. EIA says that in 2020, because of increasing natgas production without a corresponding increase in demand, they predict this year’s average HH price will sink to $2.33/MMBtu. That’s 9% lower this year than last.