Oil’s $5 Trillion Permian Boom Threatened by $70 Crude
By Joe Carroll & Edward Klump - Oct 25, 2013 11:53 AM ET
bloomberg.com
Bryan Sheffield, a third-generation oil wildcatter in Texas’s Permian Basin, knows what he’ll do if crude drops to $80 a barrel: shut down half his drilling rigs and go on a takeover hunt for weaker rivals.
Sheffield is among producers who’ve together invested $150 billion in the Permian since 2010 seeking their piece of an oil trove estimated to be worth as much as $5 trillion. As the money pours in, risks are mounting of a bust as analysts including Marshall Adkins of Raymond James & Associates Inc. forecast crude is heading down to $70 a barrel next year...
...If oil drops another 18 percent to $80 a barrel, wells in some parts of the Permian that sprawls beneath Texas and New Mexico will become money-losers, said Tim Rezvan, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. in New York.
Cline Shale Energy producers on average need oil prices around $96 a barrel to break even on wells drilled in Permian layers known as the Cline Shale and the Northern Mississippian Lime, according to Mike Kelly, an analyst at Global Hunter Securities LLC That compares to average break-even prices of around $78 a barrel in the Eagle Ford Shale a few hundred miles east of the Permian, and $84 in the Bakken of North Dakota. Some areas of the Permian need a price of just $70-$74, Kelly said...
... Brent crude, the benchmark for two-thirds of the world’s oil, is averaging $108.58 this year and probably will fall to the $70-to-$80 range, Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said without providing a time line.. |
