Why U.S. Oil and Gas Producers Aren’t Solving the Energy Crisis

The crash of 2020 and the pressure of climate-change politics led them to reconsider their business models 

By Paul H. Tice. Excerpts:

"U.S. oil and gas producers need to extend their drilling inventories and permit runways further into the future because the Biden White House is canceling or slow-walking leases on federal lands while clawing back acreage for national monuments. The administration also is taking advantage of environmental and endangered-species statutes to curtail drilling on private land. New energy infrastructure projects—including interstate pipelines and liquefied natural gas export facilities—are subject to a global climate test, a charge for the social cost of carbon and environmental-justice standards. All this will have a chilling effect on new projects and further reinforce industry consolidation.

The main risk to the industry over the next decade is not the potential for oil and gas demand to go down because of the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. It is the high likelihood of more energy supply-chain bottlenecks created by government officials. A supply-constrained scenario would be bullish for oil prices, giving producers even more incentive to keep hydrocarbon reserves in the ground now to produce them at higher realized prices down the road."

"U.S. energy companies have begun to wise up to the threat that the theory of man-made climate change poses to the industry. Since the Paris Agreement’s signing in 2015, the global goal of decreasing carbon emissions has provided moral justification for an all-out regulatory assault.

The latest front is the sustainable-investment movement sweeping Wall Street, which has climate action as its top environmental, social and governance objective. U.S. and European financial regulators are pushing through mandatory reporting standards on sustainability. This is the first step toward screening and excluding politically incorrect industries such as oil and gas from investment portfolios. As the intertwined climate-change and sustainability movements gain momentum between now and 2030, the lending and capital markets are likely to become more hostile toward traditional energy.

U.S. shale companies will need to ensure their ability to self-fund from operations and run with less balance-sheet debt to reduce their dependence on financing from the banking system and institutional investors. Consequently, corporate sustainability doctrine provides another strong argument for U.S. energy companies to maintain the status quo of slow to no production growth and to continue living within cash flow over the long term."