This week we talk about mergers, acquisitions, and the Shale Oil Revolution.

We also discuss liquid natural gas, energy diplomacy, and political hypocrisy.

Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Transcript

For the sixth year in a row, the United States is the largest oil producer in the world.

As of March 2024, it's producing an average of 12.93 million barrels of oil per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it periodically pops above that average for stretches of time, like in December of last year when it managed to average just over 13.3 million barrels per day.

That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil.

For context, while Saudi Arabia remains the holder of the world's most substantial spare oil capacity and was the largest oil exporter in 2023, they set aside plans to increase output to 12 million barrels a day back in January, which leaves them about a million barrels a day shy of the expansion target they set in 2020.

In 2023, the US produced about 28% more oil than Russia and about 33% more than Saudi Arabia, on average.

The US is becoming a huge player in oil exports, too, but it really shines if you look at not just crude oil, but also natural gas liquids and refined petroleum products. In aggregate, in 2023, the United States exported nearly the same volume of these products that both Saudi Arabia and Russia produced, not exported, which is pretty wild.

As is the fact that in December of 2023, the US exported about 400 billion more cubic feet of natural gas than it imported; and it imports a lot, and it only started exporting natural gas a few years ago, so that's the figure for an industry that didn't even exist until 2016, and didn't really grow until the 2020s.

The US hasn't always been this kind of force in the global oil market. It's long been a consumer of huge quantities of the stuff, but while it produced a decent amount until the late-90s, competing with Russia and trailing Saudi Arabia, though not by much, US production levels dropped substantially beginning in the early 90s, the US becoming a huge importer of fossil fuels, its production levels dipping down to something closer to those of Iran by the mid-2000s; when 9/11 happened in 2001, one of the big concerns was that the US's fundamental reliance on Middle Eastern oil would complicate its military options and hamstring its economy.

That all changed, though, with what became known as the Shale Revolution, when the widespread investment in and deployment of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" technologies, combined with developments that allowed for horizontal drilling, opened up huge swathes of new oil-rich territories in the US and Canada, making what were previously usable, but incredibly expensive to exploit fossil fuel resources less expensive and easier to tap, and southern US states in particular saw a wave of new and expanded drilling, leading to a surge in the US's production output, and ultimately allowing the US to become the top producer in the world beginning in 2018.

The degree to which this has changed things, geopolitically, cannot be overstated, in the US and globally.

Stateside, petroleum prices became less tethered to the whims and political motivations of mostly Middle Eastern nations and Russia, which, working together via the OPEC+ oil cartel, were long able to threaten and coerce the US government and its allies in various ways.

That remained the case for a while, even after this shale oil boom, as production and export figures weren't optimally aligned. But as this new reality has set in, the US government has been more strategic in how it has stockpiled fossil fuels resources and how it's been willing to use those stockpiles to manage price fluctuations, for itself and its allies, when warranted.

This has also been important for manufacturing, shipping, and other energy-hungry aspects of the US economy, and it has stoked booms in all sorts of consumer-facing industries, alongside the deployment of power-hungry infrastructure like new power plants and data centers.

Globally, this increased production has allowed the US to become a player in energy diplomacy, exporting fuel to allies that needed it because of disasters or foreign meddling, and recently, the US has taken this up a notch by bolstering Europe's energy supplies in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine—an invasion that led to sanctions from the EU against Russia, those sanctions arriving more slowly than they might have otherwise arrived because of concerns that Russia's stranglehold on much of the bloc's energy resources might turn into a chokehold, hobbling their economies, military preparedness, and civilian support for the sanctions, because people would be paying extreme prices for ever-shrinking volumes of energy.

In the decades leading up to that invasion, many European nations, especially Germany, completely recalibrated their economies so they could profit from Russian fuel, so the fear that those fuel supplies would dry up if they made the wrong move, supported Ukraine too ardently, was a significant concern and shaped a lot of what happened in those early days of the invasion.

The US started exporting liquified natural gas to the bloc, though, which is gas that's turned into a liquid using incredibly low temperatures, which shrinks it so that it's easier and cheaper to ship. And these shipments arrived first in drips and drabs, because the infrastructure on the receiving end, to convert that chilly liquid gas back into room-temperature, full-volumed gas, needed to be installed, but once that infrastructure was in place, LNG began to arrive from the US in huge volumes, a whole new energy economy popping up essentially overnight, relative to how these things typically go, anyway. And that enabled more and sterner sanctions from the EU, of a kind that may not have been feasible, lacking that energy resource backstop.

What I'd like to talk about today is another, even more recent development within the US oil industry, and what it might mean for the future of this industry.

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In 2023 alone, the businesses that make up the US energy sector spent about $250 billion scooping up clients, suppliers, and rivals.

A poll of energy executives in December of the same year suggested we could see another $50 billion or so invested in more acquisitions and mergers over the next two years, and in 2024, so far, as of mid-March, we've already seen APA buy Callon, Chesapeake buy Southwestern, Talos buy QuarterNorth, and Sunoco acquire NuStar; these deals all close at the tale-end of Q1 or in Q2 2024, and they were worth around $4.5, $7.4, $1.29, and $7.3 billion, respectively, so nearly $20.5 billion worth of big oil industry deals, already, and the year is just getting started, so that $50 billion figure is looking prescient.

The majority of next-step deals are expected to center around the Permian Basin, which is located in western Texas, with a little bit of overflow across the border into New Mexico.

This basin is the highest-producing oil field in the US, generating nearly 6 million barrels of oil and around 25 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day, as of early 2024, and this is a region of intense investment and growth; oil fields around the country are shutting down, and that increase in gas and oil production that we're seeing is mostly the consequence of more effective technologies and upgrades in the hardware and software being used by the industry.

So better exploration, better tools to get to the best pockets of resources, better capturing technologies and means of shuttling what they pump from place to place—it's a full stack of better tech and systems, and that is allowing the industry to consolidate its sprawl into fewer areas, many of them in the Permian Basin, and that's thought to be part of why we're seeing so much consolidation at the moment: more investment in fewer wells and fields in a smaller portion of the country is leading to more output, and that means the bigger companies with more R&D capacity and higher-end assets will tend to have a bigger advantage than their more dispersed, smaller rivals.

It's anticipated, though, that a collection of variables, including that consolidation, will actually slow the growth of the US's fossil fuel-based energy industry, at least for the next few years.

Less activity from fewer business entities and fewer investments that will lead directly to higher output is expected to nudge that 12.93 million barrels a day up by maybe 120,000 or 170,000 barrels per day, rather than the previously projected 1 million barrel a day increase.

That's the EIA projection, as least—some other analysts have higher expectations, in some cases double or quadruple that range, but the general consensus is that more of the oil wealth in this region being owned by larger entities that are aiming for consolidation, not growth in the sense of exploring and exploiting a bajillion new wells, will likely lead to a period of more tempered industry-wide growth, and probably a period in which these now-bigger companies will be focusing on getting all their ducks in a row, reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in their new, combined collection of assets, and possibly eyeballing other acquisition targets, as well—so that'll means more investment in efficiencies, less investment in upping those already sky-high production numbers.

All of this is happening within the context of efforts, globally, to reduce humanity's reliance on and use of fossil fuels. And that's led to some strange combinations of policies and political messaging, and no shortage of claims of hypocrisy from all sides of the conversation.

Case in point: even as US President Biden has celebrated US energy independence and the associated security enabled and supported by this expansion of fossil fuel production and processing, he has also flogged and signed all sorts of laws and regulations meant to reduce oil use and to increase the deployment of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources.

He's also pushed hard for government investment in clean energy and related infrastructure, including things like electric vehicles and upgrades for homes, and he's not alone in this: other wealthy nations in particular have been pushing hard to emphasize and enable this transition, as all the data indicates the faster we shift away from burning fossil fuels and engaging in other emitting activities, the less destructive the impacts of human-amplified climate change will be, and the less expensive it will ultimately be to adapt to those new realities, and to stop making them worse; to fully transition to a net-zero, and then eventually, a practically non-emittive future.

This seemingly bipolar stance can be disorienting, especially for those it directly impacts.

And consequently, rather than making everyone happy, as both sides of the climate change, renewables conversation are getting a fair bit of what they want due to these seemingly opposing investments, it's mostly just pissing everyone off, as environmentalists, climate change activists, and everyday people who are concerned about the impacts of the changing climate that they're seeing around them, more and more each year, are irritated that the segue to a non-emittive energy future isn't happening faster, while oil, gas, and coal companies are peeved that they're being elbowed out, despite having arguably gotten the country to where it is today, provide the US economy with a substantial chunk of its overall income and wealth, and in a very real way enable modern, everyday life—even for those people who want them and their products to disappear as quickly as possible.

That perception of hypocrisy is difficult to sidestep, then, because while, yes—there has been a lot of new, clean infrastructure deployed, many EV and similar companies have been invested in, and on the other side there have been all those big expansions of oil and gas infrastructure and an increase in the market for those sorts of products—these two narratives are also in diametric opposition to each other, at least in the long-term, and slow-walking a transition away from fossil fuels makes climate change worse, its impacts more devastating and longer-lasting, the worst stuff arriving faster, too, while the shift toward cleaner energy is stealing market share from those emittive energy companies, and this movement toward renewables puts a cap on fossil fuel companies' very existence, as well—some policies suggesting that they can't exist, or at least not exist at any real scale, doing the type of business they've always done, past a certain, government-mandated date.

And both of these perspectives are arguably true; so those victories both sides are accumulating are often lost in the sea of concomitant victories for the perceptually opposing side, which manifest as losses for the non-victorious side.

It's worth noting, too, that both sides actually have pretty good arguments, in isolation.

Lacking the dominant, fossil fuel-based energy sources of today, the US military wouldn't be able to operate; it simply wouldn't be able to function, which would have all sorts of knock-on effects, until and unless all of those vehicles and missiles and other bits of hardware could be replaced with cleaner versions of the same.

Lacking a full-scale replacement of every fuel-chugging car, bus, train, jet, and other piece of transportation infrastructure, the US economy would come to a halt, overnight, and that would wreak untold havoc in-country and around the world.

There's a chance that certain plastic goods would disappear, too, and a gobsmackingly large portion of all things created in the modern world are made of some kind of plastic, which is a petroleum product, and the well-being of that industry is in some ways correlated with the well-being of the rest of the industry's efforts.

That said, if we don't shift away from the use of these fuels and materials soon, we may lose the ability to counter some of the worst impacts of climate change, including many that are deadly, like overpowered and more regular storms and heatwaves, and others that will take out ecosystems and the creatures living in those ecosystems, permanently, changes to their conditions arriving so quickly they don't have a change to adapt.

Military conflicts and economy collapses may seem quaint compared to the cost and loss of lives and treasure associated with forthcoming, more common, climate change-triggered disasters and norm-shifts.

There's some indication that some Big Oil companies are making tweaks to how they do things in order to reduce the distance between their economic priorities and the priorities of folks who want them to stop pumping more fossil fuels from the ground.

Top mining officials from Saudi Arabia recently announced they're building out the systems and hardware necessary to extract the more than $2.5 trillion worth of metals they're so far located in their territory, for instance, and other state-run businesses have suggested they intend to do the same: leveraging their knowledge, tools, and expertise to mine and process some of the resources that'll be most necessary (and thus, valuable) for the transition to cleaner energy.

Some US-based Big Oil companies have made announcements about their own intentions in this regard, some saying they'll pull lithium from their oil wells, while others claim they're investing in rare earth mining infrastructure.

ExxonMobil recently announced that it would be returning to one of its old, long-closed oil wells in a small town in Arkansas to mine lithium there, which could be beneficial for their bottom line, but also for folks in that region who were left in the lurch when Exxon left to refocus on Texas in the 1990s.

A coal company operating in Wyoming, with the help of the US Department of Energy, recently discovered what could be one of the largest rare-earth metal deposits in the world, and the biggest in the US, on land that they originally bought for coal mining purposes.

These sorts of investments are not consequence-free, as mining of any kind tends to deplete local resources, especially water and energy, and can have serious and deleterious effects on people and ecosystems, too. But this does seem like one of the more likely avenues through which these companies' interests may slowly come to align with those of folks, businesses, and governments that are trying to segue the US and other economies to clean energy; and that's meaningful because otherwise these companies almost always represent the most significant, well-moneyed and lobbyist-employing roadblocks to legislation and investment that would speed up the deployment of renewables and associated infrastructure; so this type of pivot would conceivably give them reason to support, rather than hamstring those efforts.

That said, some of these announced efforts may end up being mostly PR plays, similar to how big oil companies have dangled the possibility of cleaning up their emissions using carbon drawdown technologies, for years, but few such investments have been made, and some of the deployed tools were eventually retired, as they didn't really do what they were supposed to do.

So there are potential avenues via which priorities might align more closely in the coming years, if the economics of such paths can be worked out and if the market validates them, but there's also a chance these opposing interests remain oppositional for the foreseeable future, even though both arguably scratch necessary itches, and both represent anchors and wings for politicians who support and rely upon them.

Show Notes

https://grist.org/energy/oil-companies-used-to-run-this-town-now-theyre-back-to-mine-for-lithium/

https://www.reuters.com/default/more-us-energy-deals-likely-2024-wave-consolidation-2024-01-24/

https://www.semafor.com/article/03/13/2024/inside-saudi-arabias-plan-to-take-over-the-mining-industry

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-leads-global-oil-production-sixth-straight-year-eia-2024-03-11/

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-aramco-says-it-will-cut-planned-maximum-capacity-12-mln-bpd-2024-01-30/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/record-us-oil-output-challenges-saudi-mastery-kemp-2023-12-04/

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-rise-of-the-u-s-as-top-crude-oil-producer/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gauravsharma/2023/12/19/as-2024-approaches-us-leads-global-crude-oil-production-roster/?sh=107f8c582706

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/is-us-shale-oil-revolution-over-kemp-2022-11-22/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_States

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/fracking-101

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9133us2M.htm

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/liquefied-natural-gas.php

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-was-top-lng-exporter-2023-hit-record-levels-2024-01-02/

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523

https://jpt.spe.org/the-trend-in-drilling-horizontal-wells-is-longer-faster-cheaper

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/28/energy/eu-us-oil-imports-overtake-russia/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/25/climate/fracking-oil-gas-wells-water.html

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2422110-methane-leaks-from-us-oil-and-gas-are-triple-government-estimates/

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_in_the_United_States

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/02/12/diamondback-and-endeavor-merger-trend-bigger-fewer-oil-companies/

https://www.strausscenter.org/energy-and-security-project/the-u-s-shale-revolution/

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Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020)