Guar at Record May Fail to Boost U.S. Output, Help Halliburton
This article is for subscribers only.
Record-high prices for guar, a little-known legume used increasingly to help extract crude oil, may fail to boost U.S. production enough to cut imports or reduce costs for drillers including Halliburton Co.
While planting may triple to 50,000 acres this year from 15,000 in 2011, mostly in Texas and Oklahoma, U.S. supply will be dwarfed by the 8.6 million acres that will be sown in India, the world’s largest producer, said Calvin Trostle, an agronomist at Texas A&M University. Few U.S. farmers know how to grow guar, which means “cow food” in Hindi, and there is no crop insurance like there is for corn or cotton, he said.