US shale will put a cap on the oil price

The US shale oil industry is adding more new rigs every month than at any point in the past two years, which should serve to cap the oil price rebound.

Andrew Van Sickle
By Andrew Van Sickle
published

Opec members are notorious for cheating on their production quotas. Indeed, cheating is so rife that 50% to 60% compliance is considered pretty good, says Spencer Jakab in The Wall Street Journal. But this time round the oil cartel's discipline is better. According to JCB Energy, compliance with the cuts agreed late last year is around 88%.

That's pretty good news for oil bulls, who have already seen the price more than double to $55 a barrel since early last year. Throw in a better outlook for demand as the US-led global economy is expected to strengthen a little, and the big glut is gradually being soaked up.

But how far can the rally go? As the International Energy Agency's executive director Faith Birol points out, US production is set to rise as increasingly cost-efficient shale drillers grab market share. At present, the US oil industry is adding more new rigs every month than at any point in the past two years.

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Producers in Brazil, Mexico and China are also profitable at $50-$55 a barrel. It may not be long, then, before a rise in production slows and caps the oil rebound.

Andrew Van Sickle
Andrew Van Sickle

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.

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