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Democrats_win

(6,539 posts)
Wed Nov 13, 2019, 02:19 PM Nov 2019

Denver Post: "shale boom is over."

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/10/colorado-oil-gas-industry-drilling-debt-cash-flow/

The last sentence of this long article (Drilling, dollars & debt: Colorado’s oil and gas industry is leveraged to the hilt) says:

Effectively, the shale boom is over. Long live cash flow.

Basically, the oil companies operating in Colorado's Denver/Julesburg basin north of Denver took out a lot of loans and now wall street and the banks want more cash from them. The problem is that the price of oil is too low. They also worry about the new regulations in Colorado.

"The U.S. oil rig count, a measure of how active producers are, has fallen from 889 at the start of the year to 684. In Colorado, the oil and gas rig count has dropped from 34 at the start of the year to 24, according to Baker Hughes.

my comments
1. If you watch the left-leaning economist Richard Wolff, he's said for a long time that the fracking boom is unsustainable. (The Post article says how the production of these fracked wells decline quickly)
2. The oil companies will blame their problems on the "environmentalists" and regulations, when it's just the nature of the boom/bust business and they way they operate.
3. Apparently the decline has occurred in the last year. On the ground, I've noticed that they're putting up a lot of walls, but it's a while before I see a rig. Check out the graphs in the article.
Latest Discussions»Region Forums»Colorado»Denver Post: "shale boom...