Why you shouldn't expect to see $100 oil price again soon

By John Stepek

published 13 October 2015

in Features

151013-oil-price — Fracking in America has fundamentally changed the oil industry

Oil has had a great few weeks.

Between the US dollar easing, and signs of slowing supply from US shale, it's enjoyed a massive rebound.

But how far can the oil rally go?

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How the oil industry is changing

(Incidentally, that is a useful lesson in humility for all of us who attempt to read the entrails. The unforeseeable happens a lot more often than any of us thinks possible.)

To sum up, a high oil price fuelled partly by the financialisation' of commodities that arose from overly loose monetary policy helped to encourage the search for new sources of oil.

Improvements in hydraulic fracturing (fracking'), a fringe technology, allowed reserves once deemed inaccessible to be pulled out of the ground at prices that made sense with oil at well over $100 a barrel for a prolonged period of time.

Eventually, with the Saudis pumping out oil and the US pumping out oil, fears of peak oil' faded into the background. Then the reality of China's slowdown hit home, while a strengthening US dollar started to undermine the price too.

And the oil price finally cracked last year.

Until that point, the market wisdom and this was universal, I cannot remember talking to a single oil analyst or fund manager who didn't think oil had found a permanently higher range was that Opec (Saudi Arabia, basically) would slash production to keep the price above $100 a barrel. And the idea that the price could go below $70 was madman stuff.

What happened? Well, the Saudis decided that cutting off production was really quite a stupid idea because then their customers would just queue up to get oil from elsewhere. Why should they take the pain?

This isn't the 1970s. If Opec stops producing, there won't be queues outside US petrol stations. They've got plenty of their own oil.

So, given that Saudi Arabia is the lowest-cost producer, far better to bunker down in a siege mentality and starve their opponents out.

(It's worth understanding that when you read that Saudi Arabia needs' a certain oil price, that's not about the cost of production it's about maintaining current government spending levels, which is a very different thing.)

Shale means more than just added supply

But it's having an impact. The US shale producers aren't having a good time either. Opec's own recent report notes that they are going to be hindered by "persistently low oil prices, highly leveraged balance sheets, and increasingly costly debt, coupled with a more cautious approach by equity investors who will limit the availability of cash".

You can almost see them rubbing their hands with glee. And the recent rebound in the oil price suggests that they might be right.

However, it's not that simple. Spencer Dale in the FT makes the point that the changes US shale has brought to the global oil market go beyond simply adding a big chunk of supply to the market.

The good thing (from the point of view of anyone who prefers low oil prices to high ones) about shale is that it's pretty quick to respond to changes in the oil price. Traditional oil projects take a long time to set up and get running. It's not easy to drill under the ocean, for example. You have to be pretty committed to the idea to get that sort of project up and running.

Shale is different. "The lead times between investment decisions and production of US shale can be measured in weeks", not years. So that makes it very responsive. Shale techniques also keep improving, meaning better productivity and profitability at lower prices.

That's a big change. Notes Dale: "The contraction of the shale industry that we are now observing should not be seen as a fatal blow: as prices recover, US shale is likely to bounce quickly back."

On the flipside however, shale is a lot more dependent on the flow of credit from backers. The Saudi state oil company is not going to go bust for a want of willing investors. That's not the case for US shale companies in fact, they are likely to be right at the epicentre of the next wave of defaults to shake the junk bond market.

Don't expect to see $100 a barrel of oil again soon

And we have to hope that, before that happens, we're well into the uptake of electric cars and the like.

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.