The Relentless Production of Shale Oil Is Breaking OPEC’s Neck

By Peter Coy and Matthew Philips 

December 11, 2014

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The world’s biggest oil companies faced ruin in the summer of 1931. Crude prices had plummeted. Wildcatters were selling oil from the bonanza East Texas field for a nickel a barrel, cheaper than a bowl of chili. On Aug. 17, Governor Ross Sterling declared a state of insurrection in four counties and sent 1,100 National Guard troops to shut down the fields and bring order to the market. A month later the Railroad Commission of Texas handed out strict production quotas.

That heavy-handed intervention in the free market was remarkable enough. Even more remarkable was who pulled it off. The person in charge of shutting down the wildcatters, National Guard Brigadier General Jacob Wolters, was the general counsel of Texas Co., an ancestor of Chevron (CVX). And the Texas governor who ordered Wolters in was a past president of Humble Oil and Refining, a forerunner ofExxonMobil (XOM). Big Oil played hardball in those days.

History is repeating itself, with a twist. The stressed-out giants of today are Saudi Arabia and its fellows in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The descendants of the 1930s wildcatters are today’s producers of oil from shale, who are driving down the world price of crude by flooding the market with millions of barrels of new oil each day. At $64 a barrel, Brent crude is down 44 percent since June. The twist is that today’s upstarts aren’t draining oil from neighbors’ plots, as happened in the 1930s. And OPEC can’t call in the National Guard against them. All it can do is gape at the falling price of crude and contemplate the destruction of their cartel at the hands of the Americans, whom they thought they had supplanted for good 40 years ago. Energy economist Philip Verleger says shale is to OPEC what the Apple II (AAPL) was to theIBM (IBM) mainframe.

Theories as to why OPEC didn’t reduce quotas at its meeting in Vienna on Nov. 27 are as cheap and abundant as crude in North Dakota. One holds that the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia want to hurt the Shiites of Iran, who need high-priced oil to finance their government. Another, expressed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, is that the whole thing is a conspiracy to undermine Russia, the world’s biggest oil producer. Yet another is that the Saudis hope to drive oil prices below where it makes sense for American shale producers to invest in new production. But shale producers have lowered their costs so much that in key fields they can make profits at $50 to $70 a barrel. That’s above core OPEC members’ exploration and production costs but below what many need to cover their government spending. “If my calculations are correct, this will go down as one of the worst commodity trading decisions ever,” Wilbur Ross, billionaire investor and chairman of WL Ross (IVZ), wrote in an e-mail.

In fact, prices are being forced down not by any action (or inaction) of the Saudis but by the American shale producers, who are simply producing all the oil they can to maximize their profits. “Collectively, they’re not the most sophisticated folks, especially when it comes to world markets,” says Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow in the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

With apologies to Ebinger, the shale producers don’t need to be sophisticates. Each operator is so small, it can increase production without pushing down the market price. That makes them price “takers,” not price setters. And because shale wells are short-lived, producers don’t have to plan far ahead, says Karr Ingham, a petroleum economist in Amarillo, Texas. Singly the shale busters are nothing. Collectively, their breakneck production is breaking OPEC’s neck. This is the remorseless, leaderless free market at work.

OPEC used to be something to reckon with. For a brief period in the 1970s its influence was so strong, it could set prices to the penny for scores of crudes, says Bhushan Bahree, senior director for OPEC Middle East research at market researcher IHS (IHS). Its power has waned considerably, but until this year Saudi Arabia could still be counted on to cut output for the good of the cartel when gluts emerged. The Saudis’ refusal last month to take one for the team is historic, says Michael Wittner, head of oil research at Société Générale (GLE:FP) in New York. “That is such a tremendous, dramatic change,” he says. “It’s hard to think of a way to exaggerate how fundamental it is.”