Liam Denning, Columnist

The Less Popular Oil Gets, the More It Costs

Even as prices surge, investors stand ready to punish producers for pumping more.

October 4, 2021 at 2:21 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.

Going up.
Photographer: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

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Some 18 months on from staring into the abyss, Scott Sheffield of Pioneer Natural Resources Co. is gazing into the clouds.

In April 2020 the shale CEO was calling, in vain, for the Texas Railroad Commission to impose production quotas to deal with the oil crash. Today, with oil around $80 rather than $20, Sheffield says instead the industry can self-police with unusual rigor — no matter how high oil goes: