Liam Denning, Columnist

Negative Oil Scars Will Linger for Frackers

Hedging future production may get much costlier.

April 29, 2020 at 4:41 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.

It just keeps staying cheap.
Photographer: ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/Getty Images

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April 20 didn’t start like any other day — there’s a pandemic going on — and for oil, it sure didn’t end like one either. That afternoon, the May contract for West Texas Intermediate crude settled in negative territory for the first time ever. Now we all know it was a technical, contract-rolling, Chinese-speculators-getting-eviscerated affair. After all, oil and gas producer stocks closed up that day.

But that doesn’t mean frackers can expect to escape the impact of minus-$38 oil completely.