Yves here. It appears there is a teeny bit of good news on the environment front, if you consider “less bad than promised” to be positive. Trump has promised that he would lower US energy prices via much more ambitious shale industry production. The shale industry has other ideas.
By Irina Slav, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry. Originally published at OilPrice
- Trump will encounter a very different mindset of shale industry executives in 2025 compared to the late 2010s.
- Discipline and a pragmatic approach to balancing production growth with shareholder returns are likely to hold in the industry.
- Large shale companies have curtailed capex and aren’t likely to be incentivized in any way to increase it meaningfully.
The U.S. oil and gas industry finally got what it has wanted since 2020—an American president supportive of the sector and promising to fix the regulatory burdens that have piled up over the past four years.
Although President-elect Trump is chanting “drill, baby, drill,” the priorities of the U.S. oil industry have drastically changed since Trump’s first term.
Trump will encounter a very different mindset of shale industry executives in 2025 compared to the late 2010s when he was last president.
The U.S. shale patch is drilling, but it is drilling because it wants to distribute more of the profits to shareholders. It has made huge progress in capital discipline and efficiency gains and is getting more bang for its buck. Priorities are now returns to investors and financial frames capable of withstanding oil price volatility.
U.S. oil production continues to grow and will grow in the near future. But don’t expect the stellar growth from 2018-2019—when the industry added 1 million barrels per day (bpd) to American crude output every year—just because Trump is president, analysts say.
On the campaign trail in October, the president-elect promised supporters in North Carolina, “I’m going to cut your energy prices in half, 50 percent.”
“I’ll get those guys drilling. They are wild. They are tough and wild. They are crazy. They’ll be drilling so much,” Trump said.
“Those guys” could surely use a boost to the industry, such as a permitting reform to facilitate energy infrastructure development, a lift of President Biden’s pause on LNG export projects permitting, and easier access to financing when U.S. oil and gas isn’t vilified left and right.
But they will surely beg to differ from Trump’s remark at the same North Carolina rally, “If they drill themselves out of business, I don’t give a damn, right?”
Discipline and a pragmatic approach to balancing production growth with shareholder returns are likely to hold in the industry. After the latest wave of mergers and acquisitions, large publicly traded companies hold the majority of U.S. shale production and the remaining commercial resources in the Permian, the biggest shale play where output growth has been most pronounced in recent years. These companies will continue to seek to boost investor returns and will surely want to avoid a repeat of the 2016 and 2020 oil price crashes and losses—through capital discipline and efficiency gains.
Chevron, for example, sees its capex in the Permian probably peaking this year. Chief executive Mike Wirth told the Q3 earnings call, just a few days before the U.S. presidential election, that “I think what you’ll see is this year is probably going to be the peak in Permian CapEx.”
“We’ll begin to attenuate as well and we’ll really open up the free cash flow there,” Wirth said, adding, “But the headline here is continued efficiency and productivity gains, strong free cash flow today, and we’re going to manage it for even stronger free cash flow in the future.”
Not exactly a “drill, baby, drill” plan.
Chevron’s capex is now less than half compared to a decade ago—at about $18 billion, down from $40 billion.
“We’re doing it in a much more capital-efficient manner than we ever have before,” Wirth said.
At Exxon, efficiency gains and advanced technologies have helped the supermajor double its profit per oil equivalent barrel on a constant price basis, from 2019 unit earnings of $5 per oil-equivalent barrel to $10 per barrel year-to-date in 2024, excluding Pioneer, Kathryn Mikells, ExxonMobil’s chief financial officer, said on the earnings call.
Despite the rhetoric and policy platforms, the U.S. tight oil sector “is expected to continue its steady growth, driven more by market forces and company strategy than by government policy,” Matthew Bernstein, Senior Analyst, Upstream Research at Rystad Energy, wrote in an analysis ahead of the U.S. election.
The U.S. industry’s new priorities of returning more cash to shareholders suggest that “even if prices rise, companies are unlikely to significantly increase spending, as production has somewhat decoupled from oil and gas prices,” Bernstein said.
“As a result, the traditional link between high prices and increased drilling activity has been weakened, with companies instead focusing on maintaining capital discipline and maximizing returns.”
But as recently as in 2023 there was a “drill baby drill” moment in all major plays in the US. Possibly driven by geostrategical needs? And that push resulted in an increase of production which was noticeable but far from spectacular. (The Status of U.S. Oil Production: 2024 Update Everything Shines By Dimming). The last bright spot is New Mexico’s part of the Permian basin expected to peak soon while the Texas part of the play is about it’s peak already. And all those productivity gains mentioned in Slav’s article which are almost certain very good for instant cash floods, might also mean faster well depletion and the need for more drills to compensate for the decline in future years.
So, there is still the possibility of more “drill baby drill” moments but i believe that the industry might not be interested not because “capital restraint” but quite possibly to avoid a sudden production drop in the near future (let’s say 4-5 years), in other words, because geology, but they don’t want to say it loudly.