The Denver Post reports analysts are struggling to find the words appropriate to what is happening to the oil industry right now:
Analysts and industry officials searched for new adjectives Monday to describe the cataclysmic fall of oil prices into sub-zero territory for the first time ever, prompting analysts to predict the idling of wells and bankruptcies.
“It’s unprecedented. It’s like a doomsday scenario,” said Jack Strauss, with the Daniels School of Business at the University of Denver.
The NY Times has more of the same from people in the industry:
“I’m just living a nightmare,” said Ben Sheppard, president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, which represents companies in the area of Texas and New Mexico that became the world’s most productive oil field last year.
The industry employs 10 million people among thousands of companies with billions in collective debt. A lot of those people are going to be out of work as the smaller companies seek bankruptcy protection:
Many smaller oil companies are expected to seek bankruptcy protection in the coming months after having spent years borrowing billions of dollars to extract and move crude. Production companies have $86 billion in debt coming due between 2020 and 2024, and pipeline companies have an additional $123 billion they have to repay or refinance over the same period, according to Moody’s Investors Service…
The reverberations to other industries could be significant. A decade or two ago, low oil prices would serve to bolster the American economy by reducing energy costs. But the oil industry has become so big and important — it directly and indirectly employs 10 million people — that its problems will deal a blow to many kinds of businesses, including manufacturers that build its equipment, steel companies that make its pipes and banks and hedge funds that lend it money…
“It’s a sad time for our business, that’s for damn sure,” said Jim Wilkes, president of Texland. “The future is very cloudy right now because the pricing is below our production costs.”…
“April is going to be terrible, but May is going to be impossible,” he said.
And for every job the industry employs directly, there are many other jobs that are dependent on those jobs, such as restaurants and other service jobs. Many of those may be shut down temporarily because of the virus but when they reopen, many of their former customers could be out of work for the longer term. Bloomberg points out that for every well that is shut down, there are dozens of smaller companies that will lose work and be forced to cut jobs:
Oilfield servicers are hardest hit, as roughly 20 companies are employed at each well site. As the explorers who own the wells file for bankruptcy, their pain spreads throughout the supply chain.
“Oil and gas has suddenly become a hobby that only the best capitalized companies in the industry are going to be able to continue to enjoy engaging in,” said Dan Eberhart, the chief executive of oil-field services company Canary Drilling Services, which has laid off about 200 people and implemented across-the-board salary cuts. “A hefty amount of the jobs in oil and gas are provided by oilfield service companies-and those companies are weaker than the oil companies and are going to start disappearing quickly.”
Finally, CNBC reports that 10% of oil production in the U.S. comes from tiny family owned companies producing a few barrels a day:
Glickman said the U.S. industry is so diversified that about 10% of U.S. oil comes from mom and pop drillers, with output of less than 15 barrels a day.
“Big picture, you’ve got maybe 140 refineries in this country. You probably have more than 5,000 producers. There’s no reason why the industry has to be so fragmented,” he said.
Longer term, someone will buy up all the assets that are about to get wiped out because of the glut, but that probably won’t happen until the coronavirus situation has stabilized and no one really knows when that will be. Meanwhile, wells that are capped off can be reopened but with no guarantee they’ll be as productive as they were before.
CBS This Morning had a pretty good report on this today. These are the blue collar workers and their families that AOC is not thinking about when she gets herself excited about the collapse in oil prices.
Update: An estimate out of Oklahoma says the downturn could result in 10,000 lost jobs in that state alone. And the WSJ just published a story with an estimate for possible job losses in Louisiana:
A Louisiana survey during the last two weeks of March, when oil prices were still above $20 a barrel, showed members of the state oil and gas association anticipated cutting production and employees by as much as 70% within four months, a reduction that could cost the state more than 24,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages.
Louisiana Oil & Gas Association President Gifford Briggs said the group is in the process of updating those projections in light of the recent price crash. “Our members are telling me that they’ve instructed their field people to begin shutting in production immediately,” he said.
So that 24,000 estimate was made before the negative prices on Monday. It’s going to be higher than that. Also, a Houston company cut 6,000 jobs last week.