Low Oil Prices Pose Threat to Texas Fracking Bonanza

[Purveyor]

KARNES CITY, Tex. — No place in Texas produces more oil than Karnes County, but suddenly the roaring economy here is cooling fast, chilled by the plunging price of crude.

Workers who migrated from far and wide to find work here, chasing newfound oil riches, are being laid off, deserting their recreational vehicle parks and going home. Hay farmers who became instant millionaires on royalty checks for their land have suddenly fallen behind on payments for new tractors they bought when cash was flowing. Scores of mobile steel tanks and portable toilets used at the ubiquitous wells are stacked, unused, along county roads.

“Everybody is waiting for doomsday,” said Vi Malone, the Karnes County treasurer. “Everything was good, and everybody was getting these big checks, and everybody waited for their land to be leased, and then it all came to a screeching halt around the beginning of the year.”

That screeching was the price of oil cracking — to under $45 a barrel from more than $100 a barrel last summer. After a brief revival in the spring, the benchmark American price has swooned again by more than 25 percent, plunging this week to a new low since the recession.

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The plunge has rippled far beyond the markets, sending the economy here and across the entire oil patch into turmoil. Nowhere is the sharp turn in fortunes as evident as in places like Karnes County and other parts of Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Ohio that had little oil or natural gas production until drillers figured out how to tap into hard shale rocks deep underground.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/business/energy-environment/low-oil-prices-pose-threat-to-texas-fracking-bonanza.html?_r=0

[Thinkingabout]

1. The oil industry is slowing everywhere in the US. The support groups are laying off employees and

Contracts are not coming in.

[louis-t]

2. They'll blame it on Obama, who isn't against fracking

and let them have what they wanted, only they were outsmarted by OPEC (House of Saud, actually) who wants back their market share. Won't matter much to Michigan in the short run. "Refinery issues" have our gas prices up 50 cents in one day and not expected to fall back any time soon.

By the way, every, single gas station in Macomb and Oakland counties has regular unleaded at $2.99 a gallon. No collusion there.

[ruffburr]

3. Get used to it-

Fossil fuels are on the way to becoming history , Not a moment to soon as far as I can see.