CEO of Major Shale Oil Company 'Has Second Thoughts' on Fracking Rush, Wall Street Journal Reports

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On Monday, the Wall Street Journal featured a profile of Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, whose company is known among investors for its emphasis on drawing oil and gas from the Permian basin in Texas using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, orย fracking.

Back in 2014, Sheffield told Forbes that he expected Pioneer could produce a million barrels of oil a day from the Permian basin by 2024 โ€” up from 45,000 barrels a day inย 2011.

Now, Sheffield, who left the helm of Pioneer in 2016 and returned this February, says that those million-barrel-a-day plans are looking increasingly doubtful as the industry has struggled to prove to investors that itโ€™s capable not only of producing enormous volumes of oil and gas, but that it can do so while booking profits rather thanย losses.

โ€œWe lost the growth investors,โ€ Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield told the Journal. โ€œNow weโ€™ve got to attract a whole other set ofย investors.โ€

Doubts on Shale Gas and Shaleย Oil

Sheffieldโ€™s comments on the shale oil industryโ€™s fiscal difficulties come on the heels of a warning from the former CEO of the countryโ€™s largest natural gas producer about the shale gas industryโ€™s financialย distress.

Steve Schlotterbeck, former CEO of Americaโ€™s largest producer of natural gas, described the impact over a decade of fracking on Marcellus shale drilling companies at a recent petrochemical industryย conference.

โ€œIn a little more than a decade, most of these companies just destroyed a very large percentage of their companies’ value that they had at the beginning of the shale revolution,โ€ he said, in remarks reported by DeSmog on Sunday. โ€œExcluding capital, the big eight basin producers have destroyed on average 80 percent of the value of their companies since the beginning of the shaleย revolution.โ€

Doubts about the shale drilling industryโ€™s financial prospects have simmered nearly as long as the industry has been producing oil and gas. โ€œThere is undoubtedly a vast amount of gas in the formations,โ€ the New York Times reported in 2011, citing concerns among industry insiders dating back to 2009. โ€œThe question remains how affordably it can beย extracted.โ€

In the years since, shale drillers churned out massive volumes of fossil fuels, first shale gas then shale oil, pushing American oil production up 12 million barrels a day, according to Energy Information Administration figures cited by Theย Journal.

At the same time, they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars more than theyโ€™ve earned from selling the fossil fuels they drew from theย ground.

โ€œOver the past 10 years, 40 of the largest independent oil and gas producers collectively spent roughly $200 billion more than they took in from operations, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from financial-information firm FactSet,โ€ the Journal reported. โ€œDuring that time, a broad index of U.S. oil-and-gas companies fell roughly 10 percent, while the S&P 500 index nearlyย tripled.โ€

Schlotterbeck, the former CEO of EQT who now serves on the board of directors for the Energy Innovation Center Institute which offers training for workers in the oil and gas, solar, and construction trades, offered his view of the end results for investors at the petrochemical industry conference onย Friday.

โ€œThe fact is that every time they put the drill bit to the ground, they erode the value of the billions of dollars of previous investments they have made,โ€ he said in his presentation. โ€œIt’s frankly no wonder that their equity valuations continue toย fallย dramatically.โ€

Belt-Tightening Comes Amid Regulatoryย Rollbacks

Sheffieldโ€™s own company has a rocky track record when it comes to translating production intoย profits.

โ€œIn August 2015, Sheffield said Pioneerโ€™s wells were expected to yield 45 percentย to 60 percent returns on investment at the oil prices at that time, excluding costs such as administrative expenses and taxes. The company lost $218 million in the second quarter of that year,โ€ the Journalย reported.

โ€œThe company acknowledged that capital spending exceeded operating cash flow in 2015, but said it is focused on changing that in 2019 and beyond,โ€ itย continued.

The industryโ€™s financial troubles have caused drillers like Devon Energy to beginย layoffs.

EQT, which is in the midst of a management struggle, said in January that it had also laid off workers.

So tooย isย Pioneer.

โ€œAmong those who are leaving is Mr. Sheffieldโ€™s own brother, Thomas Sheffield, the companyโ€™s vice president of health, safety and environment,โ€ the Journal reported in its Mondayย profile.

That belt-tightening comes as the Trump administration has pushed to roll back federal environmentalย regulations.

More than 80 regulations and rules written to protect the environment have either been rolled back on President Trumpโ€™s watch or are in the midst of rollbacks, according to a tracker published by the New Yorkย Times.

Eighteen of those rules applied specifically to โ€œdrilling and extraction,โ€ the Times observed, and others affect the drilling industry, like the scrapping of methane emission reporting requirements for drillers and rules aimed at curbing methane leaks on publicย lands.

‘Aggressive’ย Estimates

Timothy Dove, who helmed Pioneer from 2016 until February, had predicted the company could grow its fossil fuel production at least 15 percentย a year while cutting costย over-runs.

But those projections drew pushback from company insiders, the Journalย reported.

โ€œSeveral times in recent years, technical staffers raised concerns to management that Pioneer was being too aggressive with how it talked up its prospects to investors and potential business partners, according to people familiar with the matter,โ€ the Journal reported. โ€œIn one of those instances, the company eventually walked back internal production forecasts for some of its wells in the Permian, according to one of the people. In other instances, Pioneer continued to use what some of the people said were overly optimisticย estimates.โ€

The following year, Pioneer spent $549 million more than it earned from selling fossil fuels, the Journal reported, adding that oil prices had climbed $10 higher than the $55 a barrel that Dove had said would allow Pioneer to raise production while matching spending and earnings. Sheffield told the Journal that Pioneerโ€™s board of directors had been surprised to learn that the companyโ€™s management had gone $350 million over the boardโ€™s approved $500 million 2018 budgetย hike.

Sheffield told the Journal he was backing away from million barrel-a-day plans for Pioneer. But he also maintained it would be technically possible to produce at that rate, economicsย aside.

โ€œBut my point is the rock will produce over one million barrels a day,โ€ he told theย Journal.

Few observers would doubt that drillers can produce vast amounts of fossil fuels from shale, given the industryโ€™s history of rapidly increasingย production.

An unsettled question remains, however โ€”ย as it has since the early days of the shale rush โ€”ย at whatย cost?

Main Image: Oil and gas wells in the Texas desert. Credit:ย ยฉ Laura Evangelisto,ย 2016.
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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.

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