Liam Denning, Columnist

OPEC's Real Challenge Is Far Bigger Than Shale

Investors keep funding its rivals, and the cartel just encouraged more.

September 29, 2016 at 2:52 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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Shale? OPEC is competing with something far bigger and harder to tame: U.S. capital markets.

The morning after the night before in Algiers, Chesapeake Energy announced a private placement of $850 million in 10-year convertible notes. Chesapeake, which pioneered the shale-gas land-grab strategy before 2008, is better known these days for its creative efforts to chip away at its debts. The placement's timing may be an accident, of course. But I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest maybe not.