Skip to content
Subscriber Only
Opinion
Liam Denning

What Fracker Earnings Really Need Are Fewer Frackers

The sector is just too fragmented to lure back investors.

Not much need for this these days.

Not much need for this these days.

Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America
By

For frackers, this earnings season isn’t really about the earnings, which is just as well: After Covid-19 and the OPEC+ bust-up wrecked expectations in March, April’s negative oil prices rendered the entire quarter irrelevant. Indeed, the sector’s pitch for the entire past decade has been rendered irrelevant. That makes the upcoming round of webcasts a great opportunity to change it.

It’s important to remember exploration and production companies entered the current crisis with a serious pre-existing condition. Energy’s weighting in the S&P 500 had been collapsing for years, and the bond market was closing.