"I'm going to cut your energy prices in half"
It was, of course, Mr. Trump's campaign promise, but it had me hovering around the door of the CFO's office, conferring with him and another CPA at the company about what exactly we would do if that promise came true.
Our predicament is a bit unusual because we are both an exploration and production (E&P) and a fracking company that is actively drilling in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and operating fracking camps in the Appalachian and Illinois basins. Under the Biden-Harris administration, our E&P operations performed well due to higher oil prices, but our fracking operations saw their revenues plummet in 2024. "Blame the election", I was told. Still, if Harris wins the election, I expect the decline in services to continue.
Under Trump — which looks more and more like Trump is going to lose the election — I hope there will be some relief. Trump's victory will be a tailwind for our fracking services company. At first, at least, as in 2017, when Trump came to power, the industry began to recover after the downturn years of 2015 and 2016. At that time, OPEC went all out to compete for market share and decided to break the shale oil, only to collapse almost first.
Trump's appeal back then, the way he got us back to work, was his unwavering support for industries that fell out of favor during the Obama era. His relaxation is a stimulant for those of us who are frustrated. We relaxed our wallets, enthusiastically invested, borrowed cheap money, and paid no attention to the low oil prices at the time. With Trump, it's so much fun to break the rules. We all want to be a part of it.
But eight years from now, in a completely different world, administrative approval will no longer be enough. Our industry has become more restrained and no longer the unscrupulous cowboys of Trump's early years. Nowadays, we're driven more by profit than by horsepower on the service side, and the space between drillers. Gone are the old industries that were desperate for growth. The urge to rush blindly into debt has been replaced by a more cautious approach, a more restrained group of people staring at their own bottom line with vigilant, weary eyes. In other words, we are an industry that burns itself down. So our recovery is naturally driven by caution. If this is an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, then our "one day at a time" becomes "don't forget." Sadly, in the aftermath, we become mature, boring and predictably stable. A second mortgage on poor cash flow can have such an impact on you.
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文章来源：At What Oil Price Will Shale Drillers Stop Drilling? | OilPrice.com
Translated and edited by China International Energy Public Opinion Center