, Columnist
Don’t Count the Fracking Industry Out Just Yet
These businesses have worked through tumbling oil prices before. If anything, it made them stronger.
When the going gets tough, frackers get going.
Photographer: Matthew Busch/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
There’s one obvious group of losers from the global deal to cap oil output that’s just been thrashed out: U.S. shale producers.
For an industry that needs crude prices in the low $40s to break even, current levels below $30 a barrel seem so obviously bad that America isn’t even being asked to offer a mechanism to deliver an expected output cut of 2 million barrels per day or more. Sheer economics should drive a fall of that magnitude, without any need for the sort of direct intervention that some U.S. regulators have proposed.