Oil at $65 Could Free 500,000 Barrels From Shale ’Fracklog’

Oil needs to recover to $65 a barrel for U.S. drillers to tap a pent-up supply locked in shale wells and unleash more crude on markets than is produced by Libya.

Dipping into this “fracklog” would add an extra 500,000 barrels a day of oil into the market by the end of next year, Bloomberg Intelligence said in an analysis on Thursday. Producers in oil and gas fields from Texas to Pennsylvania have 4,731 idled wells at their disposal.

Prices are rebounding from a six-year low after drillers idled half the nation’s oil rigs, slowing the shale boom that boosted production to the highest in four decades. The number of wells waiting to be hydraulically fractured, known as the fracklog, has ballooned as companies wait for costs to drop. That could slow the recovery as firms quickly finish wells at the first sign of higher prices.

“Once service costs come down and drillers begin to work through their higher-than-normal backlog, the market should start to price in that supply coming online,” Andrew Cosgrove, an energy analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence in Princeton, New Jersey, said by phone. “It may act as a cap on prices.”

U.S. oil futures tumbled by more than $50 a barrel in the second half of last year amid a worldwide glut of crude. West Texas Intermediate for June delivery fell $1.16 to $56.58 a barrel at 11 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-24/oil-at-65-seen-freeing-half-million-barrels-from-shale-fracklog