I don't see how that visualization is in any way useful at all. In fact, it's full of a bunch of visual noise that has nothing to do with any salient point: counties where drilling is no longer active. That number grows even as the total number of rigs grows, and it continues to grow as the number of rigs declines. It's not correlated with anything. It's just a bunch of jittery, jumpy, distracting noise.
This is exceedingly meaningless. Horizontal fracturing rigs can be reanimated relatively easily. And new wells are still being dug at a feverish pace -- they just are not being finished and activated. There really has been a sea change in the petroleum world; and the productive pace can now, with fracking, be feathered ever more delicately with respect to global market prices. It'll get even better if a GOP majority ends the ban on U.S. oil exports.<p>Here's a better article this weekend: <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-producers-ready-new-oil-wave-1426288890?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-producers-ready-new-oil-wave...</a>
There is something very weird with the collapse of the oil prices. It doesn't make sense. I know mainstream media have talked about offer/demand being the reason for this crash but it doesn't make sense.<p>It says China didn't grow as much as expected, etc. Well if that'd be a simple offer/demand, the price would have not collapsed so rapidly. Oil is not like housing where bubbles comes and go. It's usually pretty steady unless something happens (9/11, 1982, etc).<p>Also, price seems to be recovering now which indicate, to me, that it's not an offer/demand issue. The oil collapsing and recovering in a ~6 months period is just plain weird.<p>If I had to bet, I'd say it's due to ISIS and their access to oil and selling it at a quarter of the ongoing prices. I read a story about that a few months back how they had access to major oil field and were selling it insanely cheap on the black market to finance their operations.<p>Those are all wild ideas. But things are just weird, I'm telling you.
I got laid off after twelve years with a major energy services company back in January, and I'm really glad to be out of that industry now.<p>Lower gas prices at the pump usually meant that layoffs were probably coming, 2-3 times a year.
I had a theory (completely unsupported by evidence or even a vague understanding of the industry) that OPEC's recent decision to not fix prices was targeted at hitting the weaker new American producers that were contributing to the recent production boom by America.
Whoa, look at this chart, it's almost like there's no active oil rigs at all!!! Whoops, looks like it's just a "data scientist" who conveniently picked the origin of the vertical axis to mislead readers. My bad.
It would be nice if they had thought to include natural gas drilling. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe that natural gas production hasn't also declined, and would have made their little timeline rather boring.