Death Knell For Fossil Fuels

Bloomberg News reports that Shakeout Threatens Shale Patch as Frackers Go for Broke : The U.S. shale patch is facing a shakeout as drillers struggle to keep pace with the relentless spending needed to get oil and gas out of the ground. Shale debt has almost doubled over the last four years while revenue has gained just 5.6 percent, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of 61 shale drillers. A dozen of those wildcatters are spending at least 10 percent of their sales on interest compared with Exxon Mobil Corp.'s 0.1 percent. "The list of companies that are financially stressed is considerable," said Benjamin Dell, managing partner of Kimmeridge Energy, a New York-based alternative asset manager focused on energy. "Not everyone is going to survive. We've seen it before." Some investors are already bailing out. On May 23, Loews Corp. (L), the holding company run by New York's Tisch family, said it is weighing the sale of HighMount Exploration & Production LLC, its oil and natural gas subsidiary, at a loss. HighMount lost $20 million in the first three months of the year, after being unprofitable in 2013 and 2012, Loews said it its financial reports. As with much of the industry, HighMount has shifted its focus to oil after natural gas prices plunged and has struggled to find sites worth developing, company records show. Mary Skafidas, a spokeswoman for Loews, declined comment. In a measure of the shale industry's financial burden, debt hit $163.6 billion in the first quarter, according to company records compiled by Bloomberg on 61 exploration and production companies that target oil and natural gas trapped in deep underground layers of rock. And companies including Forest Oil Corp. (FST), Goodrich Petroleum Corp. (GDP) and Quicksilver Resources Inc. (KWK) racked up interest expense of more than 20 percent. So much for the Bridge To Nowhere that natural gas represents. By 2020, the fracking boom will be just another big bust. Who will benefit from the bust? Solar power will. By the latter half of the third decade of the twenty-first century, solar will be the dominant source of energy on this planet.

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