If anyone is still wondering whether the Trump Administration’s goal of $50 per barrel oil price would hurt American drillers, the answer came this week from oil tycoon and wildcatter Harold Hamm, who is ceasing drilling operations in North Dakota for the first time in decades.
“This will be the first time in over 30 years that Harold Hamm has not had an operation with drilling rigs in North Dakota,” Hamm, who founded Continental Resources, told Bloomberg in a telephone interview published on Friday.
“There’s no need to drill it when margins are basically gone,” the billionaire oil magnate and Trump donor said.
Hamm first proved in the Bakken shale play in North Dakota that hydraulic fracturing could help unlock huge oil resources in horizontal drilling. The rest is history.
The U.S. shale industry has survived two market crashes in the past decade, returning stronger each time and helping U.S. crude oil production hit a record of over 13 million barrels per day.
But the breakevens in the shale plays are close to $60 per barrel WTI price. In recent months, the U.S. benchmark price has rarely topped $60 a barrel for a sustained period.
In the Bakken, the breakeven for drilling a well is now on average at least $58 per barrel, up by 4% from a year ago, as costs have increased, a BloombergNEF report has found.
President Donald Trump’s major campaign pledge of cheap oil at about $50 per barrel would reduce drilling activity in all the major basins, including the most resilient play, the Permian, analysts say.
Hamm told Bloomberg that “A lot of people are assessing their activity in all the basins.”
Lower 48 oil production will stall in 2026 for the first time since the pandemic, Wood Mackenzie said last month in its preview of what to expect in the U.S. onshore basins.
In the December Dallas Energy Survey, which encompasses mostly the Permian, one executive at an exploration and production company said that “Decreasing oil prices are making many of our firm’s wells noneconomic.”
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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