Posted on 12/06/2014 5:14:53 PM PST by Hojczyk
The ‘accidental CEO’ Mark Papa says even he underestimated the shale revolution, which will continue despite lower prices.
On Wednesday, an OnCue Express in Oklahoma City became the first U.S. filling station since 2010 to sell regular gasoline for under $2 a gallon. The national average—hovering around $2.74 this week, also the lowest since 2010—is down 51 cents in a year and continues to fall, which Goldman Sachs pegs as equivalent to a $75 billion tax cut over the past six months. Consumers can thank Mark Papa, the oilman whose role in creating this income windfall remains, for the most part, unsung. The same goes for the many other benefits of the modern American energy boom.
Mr. Papa retired last July as CEO of EOG Resources, the drilling company that he made into the largest crude-oil producer in the lower 48 over his decade and a half as chief. “They were among the pioneers of the unconventional oil and gas revolution,” says the peerless energy historian Daniel Yergin —a company that advanced new frontiers in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, allowing producers to tap dense, hard-to-extract shale.
“I can’t think of any other single event that has caused such a positive economic benefit to the nation as a whole as shale oil and shale gas,” Mr. Papa says on a visit to New York this week from his home near Houston. “The fact that oil prices have collapsed as much as they have is directly attributable to the shale revolution.”
As Mr. Papa reads the global market, the price slump is the result of “a bit more production” that has made all the difference—an additional million or so barrels of new oil daily amid world-wide demand of about 92 million barrels a day.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
Gregory Zuckerman
Good book… An amazon review
Much like ‘The Greatest Trade Ever’, this book is about bucking the odds, high risk/high return, near misses & making amazing breakthroughs. It’s much more about the unique entrepreneurial people involved than it is about the science behind a process that is leading the US back to energy production self-sufficiency.
The author is unparalleled at exploring these characters while weaving together the details of a very disparate, but wildly entertaining story about a group of people who essentially changed the world. One aspect I really enjoyed was the humor. There are laugh-out-loud moments in the book within the details of these compelling, quirky people. Hilarious. It keeps you hooked on the characters & is very compelling to read.
Just saved $16 on a fill up over what is cost me not long ago.
paywall ... give us the Cliff Notes
$2.55 today in Mahwah NJ
$2.759 in Georgetown, DE.
With the price of RBOB gas at the refinery at $1.82 or so, the retail price should come down to about $2.45/gal here in the next few weeks or so.
Prices sure come down slowly, they go up instantly.
Imagine how much worse our economy would be without fracking. I wonder how much of the genuine good news in our economy can be traced directly or indirectly to fracking?
CC
Mark Papa is head of the largest shale oil producer in the lower 48. He’s quoted as saying that conventional wisdom was that you could get NG from fracked shale, but the larger molecules of shale oil wouldn’t yield to that approach. But he realized that NG from shale was headed for market saturation and a decline in NG price.So he decided it was worthwhile to try, and after about nine failures they started to succeed in extracting oil. And the improvement in the fracking extraction techniques has exceeded his own - what he thought were optimistic - expectations by a factor or more than 2. The break in the price of crude is the result of that (as well as of some production-favorable international developments).
He indicates that improvement in the fraction of oil in a play which is extracted has been rapid and will continue.
Are all the various govt taxes on a gallon of gasoline % figures or absolute figures? If % figures, the guv is feeling pain.
thank you!
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