We're Getting Fracked by the FED

[planosteve]

Today’s Mises Daily article covered the impact of government subsidies and infrastructure on the fracking boom. But there is another big player in the oil and gas boom that is routinely ignored by “energy independence” enthusiasts who claim the sky is the limit for fracking: cheap money from the central bank.

Energy companies are employing massive debt schemes to finance exploration and initiation of extraction plans. According to Bloomberg:

Quicksilver acknowledges the company is over-leveraged, said David Erdman, a spokesman for Quicksilver. The company’s interest expense equaled almost 45 percent of revenue in the first quarter. “We have taken concrete measures to reduce debt,” he said.

Drillers are caught in a bind. They must keep borrowing to pay for exploration needed to offset the steep production declines typical of shale wells.

“Interest expenses are rising,” said Virendra Chauhan, an oil analyst with Energy Aspects in London. “The risk for shale producers is that because of the production decline rates, you constantly have elevated capital expenditures.”

Chauhan wrote a report last year titled “The Other Tale of Shale” that showed interest expenses are gobbling up a growing share of revenue at 35 companies he studied. Interest expense for the 61 companies examined by Bloomberg totaled almost $2 billion in the first quarter, 4.1 percent of revenue, up from 2.3 percent four years ago.

Yes, “interest rates are rising,” but they’re still extremely low in the big scheme of things, thanks to the unending new money flowing from central banks. Even with rising rates, however, fracking operations, in order to remain viable, will need to keep borrowing since, as it turns out, fracking is extremely expensive


Just a few of the roadblocks: Independent producers will spend $1.50 drilling this year for every dollar they get back. Shale output drops faster than production from conventional methods. It will take 2,500 new wells a year just to sustain output of 1 million barrels a day in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Iraq could do the same with 60.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/oil ... eap-money/