• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 1 min GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 7 hours How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 9 hours If hydrogen is the answer, you're asking the wrong question
  • 4 days Oil Stocks, Market Direction, Bitcoin, Minerals, Gold, Silver - Technical Trading <--- Chris Vermeulen & Gareth Soloway weigh in
  • 6 days The European Union is exceptional in its political divide. Examples are apparent in Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Netherlands, Belarus, Ireland, etc.
  • 22 hours Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs
  • 4 days "What’s In Store For Europe In 2023?" By the CIA (aka RFE/RL as a ruse to deceive readers)
Tsvetana Paraskova

Tsvetana Paraskova

Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. 

More Info

Premium Content

Is $70 Oil Enough For Shale Drillers?

WTI Crude prices have recently surged to their highest level in three and a half years—just above $70 a barrel. In theory, that’s higher than the average breakeven costs of all key U.S. shale plays. Even $60 WTI is higher than the average breakeven prices, as per the latest quarterly Dallas Fed Energy Survey from March.

Yet, U.S. shale producers are not necessarily raking in huge profits, although Q1 was their best start to a year in three years.

Profits are constrained by pipeline bottlenecks in the Permian, higher costs for drilling services, some bad hedging bets capping part of company sales at below market prices, the huge discount of WTI Midland crude to WTI and Brent due to said bottlenecks amid soaring production, and investment in more drilling activity.

U.S. shale producers face takeaway bottlenecks in the Permian, which is widening the WTI Midland crude discount to WTI Crude. So the prices at which producers sell their oil is not the same as the one we see on the oil price charts.

“Even as falling inventories and geopolitical risks put upward pressure on benchmark crude spot prices, tightening constraints on crude oil transport are increasingly driving a wedge between the Brent global crude benchmark and crude priced in the Permian Basin,” the Dallas Fed said in its May 2018 Energy Indicators report.

“The discount between Brent crude and WTI barrels priced in Midland increased from an average of $2 in the first half of 2017 to an average of $5.30 in the second half. Congested takeaway capacity from the Permian has further widened the discount in 2018. That spread averaged $10.77 in April—the largest monthly spread between the two since September 2014.”

The EIA also flagged the rapidly widening spread in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook from May 8. Related: U.S. Oil Exports Continue To Break Records

“As production grows beyond the capacity of existing pipeline infrastructure, producers must use more expensive forms of transportation, including rail and trucks. As a result, WTI Midland price spreads widened to the largest discount to Brent since 2014. The WTI Midland differential to Brent settled at -$17.69/b on May 3, which represents a widening of $9.76/b since April 2,” the EIA said.

In addition, companies have increased investment in drilling more in the Permian and even in the Bakken, so their positive cash positions have not boomed in lockstep with the rallying WTI oil prices.

Shale companies “are just not generating enough cash to fund all of their investment in new wells,” James Williams, energy economist at WTRG Economics, told MarketWatch’s Myra Saefon.

“But the cash flows in over time, after you spend the money on drilling the well,” Williams noted.

Most of the top 20 U.S. oil firms focused on shale drilling were still spending in Q1 more cash than they were making, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal based on FactSet data. Of those 20 companies, just five generated more cash than they spent in Q1, according to the WSJ analysis.

Then, even if prices are now higher than the average breakevens across the major basins, cost inflation is back with a vengeance, and shale companies expect a double-digit cost jump this year, while there is also a shortage of fracking crews and truck drivers in parts of the Permian.

Moreover, some shale producers have been booking losses from hedging, after they hedged part of their production at $50 and $55 a barrel WTI, which caps part of their gains when prices rally well above that level. Hedging contracts capped at $65 or below are now a drag on company sales instead of the lifeline they were during the oil price slump.

ADVERTISEMENT

“These companies aren’t exposed to the higher prices because many of them hedged their oil production at $50 per barrel,” Matt Badiali, senior research analyst at Banyan Hill, told MarketWatch.

Rallying oil prices surely help U.S. producers, but they still have work to do to turn the higher prices (assuming they are sustainable) into higher profits.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:


Download The Free Oilprice App Today

Back to homepage





Leave a comment
  • Frank on May 20 2018 said:
    Even at $62 these guys were willing to into unimaginable debt to leverage up operations. In a couple months we'll see a mile high geyser then it all goes bust in 2019 when we can no longer pretend the glut is gone.
  • Paul Farrell on May 20 2018 said:
    Shale has never made any profit ever whilst Oil majors have had their best Q1 ever, in some cases. There is always an excuse for shale's lack of performance. Shale has ponzi scheme written all over it.
  • Aghast on May 21 2018 said:
    The minerals in the US are OWNED BY THE CITIZENS and NOT THE GOVERNMENT and therefore, producing oil in the USA has a economic compounding effect which is not found any where else in the world.

    To simply look at break even for the drillers, excludes the larger economic consequences of the US producing its own oil.

    Europe will rely upon IRAN rather than be exposed for accepting billions in bribes and Russia will be there to heat their homes and fuel their industry. The European Union will be broken up soon as a failed experiment. The entire fabricated "world order" is being dismantled.

    Oil prices will eventually skyrocket due investments being made in EV rather than new oil discoveries. Electric vehicles are hazardous waste powered by fire prone extremely unstable lithium batteries that in the end, provide no improvement to the quality of our environment.

    How much is a used electric car worth with no battery? Who paid for the disposal of the battery? Was it economical to dispose of the battery in an environmentally secure fashion or is it cheaper to toss it in a hole and worry about it later?
  • The masked avenger on May 21 2018 said:
    Shale makes money at 35. Don't kid yourself.
  • Harryflashmanhigson on May 22 2018 said:
    It has never made a penny, and it likely never will.

    It's a gusher all right, an absolute explosion of debt and losses.

Leave a comment




EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News