

Watch Four Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Seconds - headShrinker
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-oil-rigs/

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ianamartin
I don't see how that visualization is in any way useful at all. In fact, it's
full of a bunch of visual noise that has nothing to do with any salient point:
counties where drilling is no longer active. That number grows even as the
total number of rigs grows, and it continues to grow as the number of rigs
declines. It's not correlated with anything. It's just a bunch of jittery,
jumpy, distracting noise.

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nni
while it's nice to look at, I had the same impression - maybe there's a
critically missing additional note or something that would help clarify this.

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ianamartin
I'd say there is definitely something missing here: a link bait disclaimer.

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malchow
This is exceedingly meaningless. Horizontal fracturing rigs can be reanimated
relatively easily. And new wells are still being dug at a feverish pace --
they just are not being finished and activated. There really has been a sea
change in the petroleum world; and the productive pace can now, with fracking,
be feathered ever more delicately with respect to global market prices. It'll
get even better if a GOP majority ends the ban on U.S. oil exports.

Here's a better article this weekend: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-
producers-ready-new-oil-wave...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-producers-
ready-new-oil-wave-1426288890?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories)

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kbutler
The best line from the original article was "The fracklog has become America’s
de facto backup storage."

That's the key take-away: There's a huge inventory of readily available oil.
Supply isn't coming down any time soon, which is great news for everyone who
isn't in the oil industry.

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danieltillett
I don’t think it is good news for anyone. Burning all this oil is not going to
do the environment much good.

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pothibo
There is something very weird with the collapse of the oil prices. It doesn't
make sense. I know mainstream media have talked about offer/demand being the
reason for this crash but it doesn't make sense.

It says China didn't grow as much as expected, etc. Well if that'd be a simple
offer/demand, the price would have not collapsed so rapidly. Oil is not like
housing where bubbles comes and go. It's usually pretty steady unless
something happens (9/11, 1982, etc).

Also, price seems to be recovering now which indicate, to me, that it's not an
offer/demand issue. The oil collapsing and recovering in a ~6 months period is
just plain weird.

If I had to bet, I'd say it's due to ISIS and their access to oil and selling
it at a quarter of the ongoing prices. I read a story about that a few months
back how they had access to major oil field and were selling it insanely cheap
on the black market to finance their operations.

Those are all wild ideas. But things are just weird, I'm telling you.

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jfoutz
When oil is expensive, lots of techniques are available to extract it, shale
oil becomes worthwhile, for example. Saudi Arabia is driving the price down by
selling a lot of oil for very low prices.

If you're the United States or Russia, oil production is a relatively small
part of the GDP. We use a lot of oil, but don't really care much where it
comes from. Iran on the other hand, that's like 1/4th of their GDP. (I don't
know if Iran or ISIS or even Iraq is the target. I don't think Saudi Arabia
would have a problem with hurting any of them) Price changes there hit very
very hard. Directly it lowers oil employment, it lowers tax revenue, and it
affects all sorts of businesses in the area. Unemployed people don't go out to
restaurants for lunch, which hurts employment and tax revenue even more.

So then, the problems become political. Countries and organizations need to
start rethinking policies about how nice they're going to be to their
neighbors.

I don't know what Saudi Arabia's goal is, but with a trillion dollars in the
bank, they can sell at a loss for a long long time. Prices that low cut off
the air supply for several of their neighbors. I think we'll see big changes
in middle eastern governments policies before prices go back up.

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rwmj
Most likely Saudi Arabia's goal is to drive the new oil-producing techniques
(shale), and especially alternatives to oil (solar, nuclear etc), out of
business. At least for as long as they can.

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jfoutz
I dunno. That seems very short sighted. Maybe that is indeed the case, and
they are burying their heads in the sand (heh).

I think they're very aware that once oil hits $50 a barrel (or whatever) oil
companies in the U.S. flip the switch and turn shale production back on. It's
not "lost technology". If anything new technologies will ramp up even faster
thanks to the recent boom.

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mrbill
I got laid off after twelve years with a major energy services company back in
January, and I'm really glad to be out of that industry now.

Lower gas prices at the pump usually meant that layoffs were probably coming,
2-3 times a year.

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eco
I had a theory (completely unsupported by evidence or even a vague
understanding of the industry) that OPEC's recent decision to not fix prices
was targeted at hitting the weaker new American producers that were
contributing to the recent production boom by America.

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punee
Whoa, look at this chart, it's almost like there's no active oil rigs at
all!!! Whoops, looks like it's just a "data scientist" who conveniently picked
the origin of the vertical axis to mislead readers. My bad.

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spuz
If you were not fooled by the scale of the y axis what makes you think anyone
else would be? It belies an underlying arrogance to think that others would be
misled where you were not.

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punee
What makes you think I wasn't fooled? What makes you think that's not
precisely why I wrote the comment after originally feeling misled? What makes
you think that's not exactly what my comment attempted to convey?

I fail to see where there's any arrogance in my comment, very much unlike in
your ridiculous white knight posturing. "Others" have not reported feeling
slighted until now, thank you very much.

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phazmatis
It would be nice if they had thought to include natural gas drilling. The fact
that they didn't leads me to believe that natural gas production hasn't also
declined, and would have made their little timeline rather boring.

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shire
Does this mean looking for work in the oil rigs is meaningless?

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mrbill
Right now, yes. TONS of people in the industry just got laid off.

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shire
wow that's horrible. Will things go back to normal? What if you have a CDL.

