Taken from a LinkedIn post:
I have seen so much misunderstanding of how oil works online this week.
1) You don’t just “open a valve” to increase oil production.
It is extremely capital & time-intensive to extract hydrocarbons.
You have to get permits approved, construct locations, drill the well, frac the well, build production infrastructure etc.
You are talking a 6-month cycle at best.
Then you layer other constraints on top of that:
-labor shortages cause a limited supply of oilfield services so you can’t bring wells on as quickly
-steel shortages make sourcing pipe difficult
2) Now you’re asking O&G companies to ramp up capex to increase production.
It’s a very tough ask when the feds have created so much uncertainty from a regulatory perspective with rhetoric and actions such as banning drilling on federal lands, pulling pipeline permits, etc.
Essentially the message is:
“There isn’t a place for oil and gas in this world, you’re being phased out.”
It’s hard to make investments with those headwinds, but now that’s what’s being asked.
3) Americans have become addicted to cheap oil and gas.
That was enabled by investors subsidizing the costs over the last decade and incinerating their capital.
Now investors want O&G companies to focus on sustainable free cashflow and return capital.
Shocker.
This has caused O&G companies to go into maintenance mode and limit production growth.
4) Activists have been pushing for the divestment of fossil fuels.
Countless endowment funds, institutions, banks and other entities have announced their withdrawal from O&G.
(Preventing the ability to finance energy and support humans isn’t looking so noble now)
5) Now oil and gas companies are being painted as the bad guys for not producing enough oil.
Despite years of capital being sucked out of the space, increasing hurdles to build infrastructure and activists attacking the industry, it’s now the O&G companies who are at fault.
They are at fault for something that they can not physically do in such a short amount of time.
They operate at low prices and give Americans an extremely prosperous life, the response:
“You’re killing the planet, we’re going to end you, leave it in the ground”
They stop chasing production growth and leave it in the ground, the response:
“Greedy oil companies only care about profits, they don’t care about human suffering or else they would increase production”
People in the O&G industry have every right to be upset right now.
They wake up and work hard to power the world and support human flourishing, just to be told by critics on twitter that they’re evil.
Now those critics are in desperate need of help and the only people that can save them are the ones they have been demonizing for the last 10 years.
Bad energy policy and misguided activists have led to this problem.
Full stop.
People are getting a hard dose of reality on energy production and realizing how critical it is to society.
The oil companies didn’t cause this.
