U.S. shale oil: Can a leaner industry ever lure back investors?
ACTIVITY WILL BE FOCUSED ON FEWER PROLIFIC FIELDS, MAINLY IN TEXAS
ARE PEOPLE GOING TO RETURN TO GROWTH? IS US SHALE GOING TO GROW? THE ANSWER IS NO. DON’T ANTICIPATE A BIG RAMP UP IN DRILLING, PEOPLE ARE NOT GOING TO GO BACK TO THE OLD WAYS. — SCOTT SHEFFIELD, PIONEER’S CHIEF EXECUTIVE
smaller, slower and more profitable. These are the watchwords for Chesapeake energy Corp. as it emerges from bankruptcy. Free of the colossal liabilities that sank it as the pandemic slashed global energy demand last year, the company has also abandoned the growthat-all-costs strategy that made it a pioneer of the shale revolution — and poster child of the sector’s debtfuelled excess.
Chesapeake’s market value will be a fraction of the us$35 billion it boasted more than a decade ago, back when its controversial founder, the late Aubrey Mcclendon, was America’s bestpaid chief executive and his company poured money into everything from Oklahoma real estate to an NBA arena. The new Chesapeake pledges to spend less than it brings in and return the excess to shareholders.
Outside the u.s. oil and gas industry, this wouldn’t sound radical. Within the business, it is a departure. The only feature that matched shale’s disruptive rise in the past 15 years — more than doubling u.s. oil and gas production and sharply reducing dependence on foreign oil supplies — was the industry’s unmatched knack for destroying investors’ money, as hundreds of billions of dollars were spent with little return. Wall Street reacted by dumping its stocks, making the sector one of the S&P 500’s smallest. When the worst oil crash in decades struck last year, operators were forced to slash capital expenditure, sack tens of thousands of workers, idle rigs and cut production. Chesapeake’s Chapter 11 filing was just the most high-profile of scores of bankruptcies.
Now, promise shale executives, a more resilient industry is emerging from the ashes that aims to woo investors. Like the reincarnated Chesapeake, it will be smaller — some analysts believe the sector will be reduced to just 10 dominant shale producers.
Production increases will be modest, and financed from cash flow. And activity will focus on fewer prolific shale fields, mainly in Texas.
Oil operators that feared new u.s. president Joe biden’s ambition to launch a green energy revolution would stymie the industry’s drilling and slow production growth, now promise to do both themselves.
“I do believe we have a lot of proving to do to get investors back,” says Vicki Hollub, head of Occidental Petroleum, which 18 months ago racked up us$50 billion in debt buying a rival producer in a deal now considered one of the most reckless gambles in the shale patch’s short history.
Cash flow and earnings growth must be the new priorities, Hollub says. “I believe that the watershed moment is here and our industry will, I don’t think, ever be the way we have been in the past.”
Can the industry’s new pitch be trusted? Some investors remain skeptical, remembering how past promises of capital discipline crumbled when oil prices rose. “Give an oilman a dollar and he’ll drill a well,” runs the old industry adage. In an era when environmental concerns are already deterring investment in fossil fuels, and long-term growth in oil demand is no longer assured, shale executives know they cannot risk breaking more promises.
“Why should investors trust it?” asks Matt Gallagher, who headed Parsley energy, a shale producer acquired by larger operator Pioneer Natural resources last year. “They shouldn’t.” After years of growth, shale’s cash-intensive business model was running on fumes even before Saudi Arabia’s price war with russia and the coronavirus pandemic crashed the oil market last year. The sector’s defining feature is the fast decline of each shale well’s production, where output can drop by 80 per cent after just a year. To offset the loss, another must be drilled. Then another, to offset that well’s loss.
“In a shale play if you stop running, you will fly off the back of the treadmill,” says raoul Leblanc, vice-president of energy at consultancy IHS Markit and former head of strategic planning at Anadarko Petroleum, the company bought by Occidental in 2019. “Just to stay still, you’ve got to do a lot of drilling.”
Operators drilled more than 14,000 shale wells in 2019, according to rystad, an energy research company. It helped the u.s. hit record-high oil output near 13 million barrels a day, a level unmatched even by Saudi Arabia and russia, the world’s next biggest producers.
That was a rise from 5 million bpd just eight years earlier — a surge that sparked booms from Texas to North dakota and helped drag the u.s. economy out of the mire of the global financial crisis, adding one percentage point to GDP between 2010 and 2015, according to the Federal reserve bank of dallas. but it required huge infusions of cash offered at basement interest rates. rystad says the sector spent around us$400-billion capital in those years, but by 2019 free cash flow arrived only once, in 2016.
“The fundamental problem with the shale model over the past decade has been the pursuit of growth over return on capital employed or returning capital to shareholders,” says ben dell, managing partner at Kimmeridge, a private equity firm that has built up an activist position in the sector.
Investors that rushed to finance shale’s recovery from the 2014-15 price crash — an earlier Saudi price war to capture market share — were fleeing by 2019. As capital markets began to close for shale companies, operators were forced to trim spending plans, reducing new drilling activity. With profits still absent and growth prospects diminishing, the shale patch entered 2020 in distress.
A reputation for flagrant corporate misgovernance and excess — from colossal executive bonuses earned by hitting oil output growth targets, not profits, to flashy office developments and rumours of company-funded hunting trips — didn’t help.
Then came last year’s price crash, including the symbolic moment in April when West Texas Intermediate, the country’s benchmark crude contract, traded below zero for the first time. “COVID hits, oil prices collapse, everyone has to cut their capex, valuations crash,” says Aaron decoste, an equity analyst at boston Partners, an institutional investor. “And it’s effectively reset the entire industry.”
Just a few shale companies showed they could survive the collapse last year in relative health, says Gallagher. From Chesapeake to scores of smaller producers, the distress was acute, with more than 100 operators and service providers, with us$102 billion in debt, going under, according to a rystad analysis from law firm Haynes and boone.
“The ones that went wrong went way wrong,” Gallagher says. “What’s going on now is people are finding religion about the models that work.” One tenet of the new shale “religion” is that scale is critical to survival — but of operators, not the overall sector. The mergers and acquisitions to achieve adequate size, coupled with the consolidation of weakened companies, will continue to shrink the number of producers.
Lee Maginniss, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, an advisory firm involved in oil industry restructuring, says subscale producers will face “intense” pressure. From around 500 exploration and production companies in the us before the crash, 50 may survive, he says. Other analysts say just 10 or so dominant public shale companies will be left to run the best plays.
M&A activity is brisk, with us$52-billion worth of deals done in the u.s. oil sector last year, according to enverus, a data provider. Chevron moved first, buying Noble energy in July. Conocophillips bought Concho resources. devon energy merged with WPX energy. Heavy debt, battered balance sheets and weak equity valuations meant that stocks, not cash, were the currency in each deal.
Pierre breber, Chevron’s chief financial officer, expects the consolidation wave to continue. “you need to have bigger players, stronger players, more disciplined management teams, stronger balances sheets,” he says. Scott Sheffield, Pioneer’s chief executive, says only companies with market capitalization above $10bn will remain attractive to a value-focused investor base.
Scale will also allow them to compete with exxonmobil and Chevron, u.s. majors which have built up commanding shale positions. between them they intend to produce about 2 million bpd from the Permian basin later this decade — almost a fifth of total current u.s. crude production.
Most of the M&A activity has occurred in that shale oilfield, the world’s most prolific, where operators will concentrate on the rich layers of oil-bearing rocks in the delaware and Midland basins of New Mexico and Texas. Gas-focused players, such as the revamped Chesapeake, are likely to stick to their best assets. Other shale fields, even the bakken of North dakota that sparked the shale oil rush a decade ago, will lose out.
“The heydays of the bakken, (Texas’s) eagle Ford, (Nebraska’s) Niobrara, the Scoop Stack play in Oklahoma, are all over,” says Sheffield, referring to other shale fields in the u.s. but the main feature of the post-crash shale patch will be an era of tepid growth — if it expands at all. rick Muncrief, chief executive of devon, says his company can now break even at us$30 a barrel or less, well below the us$50-plus for oil in recent weeks. yet devon will hold its rig count flat this year, only drilling a few wells to meet the lease terms of some acreage.
“From publicly traded companies you’ll see a very measured response,” says Muncrief. u.s. oil production is likely to fall by 200,000300,000 bpd as a result, he believes, remaining around 11m bpd — well below the record highs set before last year’s crash.
“Are people going to return to growth? Is u.s. shale going to grow? The answer is no,” says Sheffield. “don’t anticipate a big ramp up in drilling, people are not going to go back to the old ways.”
even if oil prices hit us$100, Sheffield says his company would only increase output by 5 per cent a year — less than half the rate of average annual growth in total shale production between 2008 and the beginning of last year.
Analysts say this will be enforced by the market, which has punished excessive supply growth — even before the pandemic hit last year — reducing oil and gas’s share of the S&P 500 almost to a footnote.
“The reason why energy is down to 2 per cent of the S&P 500 is because of that behaviour,” says breber. until the world has fully recovered, it will not need shale producers to increase oil supply, he says.
So far, operators are holding the line. rystad says third-quarter capital spending by the 39 main shale operators it covers was us$3.6-billion beneath cash flows from operations, allowing a record 89 per cent of operators to balance their budgets. If the discipline sticks, dividend- and value-focused investors could be lured back.
“I see attractive fundamentals that I haven’t seen for 20 years,” says decoste, referring to the cheap valuations of some operators, juxtaposed with expectations for higher oil prices. but he is cautious about the new capital discipline pledges: “It takes years to build your reputation and moments to destroy it.”
WE HAVE A LOT OF PROVING TO DO TO GET INVESTORS BACK.