CEO of Major Shale Oil Company 'Has Second Thoughts' on Fracking Rush

By Sharon Kelly
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, or 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 – up from 45,000 barrels a day in 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 it's capable not only of producing enormous volumes of oil and gas, but that it can do so while booking profits rather than losses.
"We lost the growth investors," Sheffield told the Journal. "Now we've got to attract a whole other set of investors."
Doubts on Shale Gas and Shale Oil
Mr. Sheffield's comments on the shale oil industry's fiscal difficulties come on the heels of a warning from the former CEO of the country's largest natural gas producer about the shale gas industry's financial distress.
Steve Schlotterbeck, former CEO of America's largest producer of natural gas, described the impact of over a decade of fracking on Marcellus shale drilling companies at a recent petrochemical industry conference.
"In 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," he said, in remarks reported by DeSmog on Sunday. "Excluding capital, the big eight basin producers have destroyed on average 80 percent of the value of their companies since the beginning of the shale revolution."
Doubts about the shale drilling industry's financial prospects have simmered nearly as long as the industry has been producing oil and gas. "There is undoubtedly a vast amount of gas in the formations," The New York Times reported in 2011, citing concerns among industry insiders dating back to 2009. "The question remains how affordably it can be extracted."
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 The Journal.
At the same time, they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars more than they've earned from selling the fossil fuels they drew from the ground.
"Over 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," the Journal reported. "During that time, a broad index of U.S. oil-and-gas companies fell roughly 10%, while the S&P500 index nearly tripled."
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 on Friday.
"The 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," he said in his presentation. "It's frankly no wonder that their equity valuations continue to fall dramatically."
Belt-Tightening Comes Amid Regulations Rollbacks
Sheffield's own company has a rocky track record when it comes to translating production into profits.
"In August 2015, Mr. Sheffield said Pioneer's wells were expected to yield 45% to 60% 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," the Journal reported.
"The company acknowledged that capital spending exceeded operating cash flow in 2015, but said it is focused on changing that in 2019 and beyond," it continued.
The industry's financial troubles have caused drillers like Devon Energy to begin layoffs.
EQT, which is in the midst of a management struggle, said in January that it had also laid off workers.
So too, is Pioneer.
"Among those who are leaving is Mr. Sheffield's own brother, Thomas Sheffield, the company's vice president of health, safety and environment," the Journal reported in its Monday profile.
That belt-tightening comes as the Trump administration has pushed to roll back federal environmental regulations.
More than 80 regulations and rules written to protect the environment have either been rolled back on Mr. Trump's watch or are in the midst of rollbacks, according to a tracker published by The New York Times.
Eighteen of those rules applied specifically to "drilling and extraction," 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 public lands.
"Aggressive" Estimates
Timothy Dove, who helmed Pioneer from 2016 until February, had predicted the company could grow its fossil fuel production at least 15% a year while cutting cost overruns.
But those projections drew pushback from company insiders, the Journal reported.
"Several 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," the Journal reported. "In 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 optimistic estimates."
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 Pioneer's board of directors had been surprised to learn that the company's management had gone $350 million over the board's approved $500 million 2018 budget hike.
Mr. 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, economics aside.
"But my point is the rock will produce over one million barrels a day," he told the Journal.
Few observers would doubt that drillers can produce vast amounts of fossil fuels from shale, given the industry's history of rapidly increasing production.
An unsettled question remains, however — as it has since the early days of the shale rush — at what cost?
#Fracking in 2018: Another Year of Pretending to Make Money https://t.co/FoGWSclUq3 @DeSmogBlog @NYAgainstFRACK
— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) December 23, 2018
Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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