Shale Fracking Is a “Ponzi Scheme” … “This Decade’s Version of The Dotcom Bubble” … “A Lot In Common With the Subprime Mortgage Market Just Before It Melted Down”
Posted on
September 19, 2014 by
WashingtonsBlog
A Losing Bet
In 2011, the New York Times
wrote:
“Money is pouring in” from investors even though
shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company,
wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail.
“Reminds you of dot-coms.”
“The word in the world of independents is that
the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work,” an analyst from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company,
wrote in an e-mail on Aug. 28, 2009.
A review of more than 9,000 wells, using data from 2003 to 2009, shows that — based on widely used industry assumptions about the market price of gas and the cost of drilling and operating a well —
less than 10 percent of the wells had recouped their estimated costs by the time they were seven years old.
Although the bankers made a lot of money from the deal making and a handful of energy companies made fortunes by exiting at the market’s peak,
most of the industry has been bloodied — forced to sell assets, take huge write-offs and shift as many drill rigs as possible from gas exploration to oil, whose price has held up much better.
***
Now the gas companies are committed to
spending far more to produce gas than they can earn selling it. Their stock prices and debt ratings have been hammered.