“Nearly every American has benefited from shale gas, with one big exception,” he said, “the shale gas investors.”
Shale Pioneer: Fracking Is An “Unmitigated Disaster”
The shale gas revolution has frankly been an unmitigated disaster for any buy-and-hold investor in the shale gas industry with very few limited exceptions,” Steve Schlotterbeck, former chief executive of EQT, a shale gas giant, said at a petrochemicals conference in Pittsburgh. “In fact, I'm not aware of another case of a disruptive technological change that has done so much harm to the industry that created the change.”
He did not pull any punches. “While hundreds of billions
of dollars of benefits have accrued to hundreds of millions of people,
the amount of shareholder value destruction registers in the hundreds of
billions of dollars,” he said. “The industry is self-destructive.”
The message is not a new one. The shale industry has been burning
through capital for years, posting mountains of red ink. One estimate
from the Wall Street Journal
found that over the past decade, the top 40 independent U.S. shale
companies burned through $200 billion more than they earned. A 2017 estimate
from the WSJ found $280 billion in negative cash flow between 2010 and
2017. It’s incredible when you think about it – despite the record
levels of oil and gas production, the industry is in the hole by roughly
a quarter of a trillion dollars.
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SHALE OIL PONZI SCHEME
