Okay, so picture this: oil’s doing this slippery slide. It’s like when you accidentally drop the soap in the shower and it bounces around for what seems like forever—yeah, that’s crude oil this week, slithering its way down into the 50s. Like, who woulda thought, right? And this is where it gets kinda messy for US oil production—it’s really taking a kick in the shins. The fancy term for this is "drilled-but-uncompleted wells"—shortened to "DUCs." Which is not ducks but sounded fowl to me at first too. Get it? Ducks?
Anyway, it means we’ve kinda used up these easy-to-reach barrels in places that used to be, like, the oil equivalent of a candy store. Like pulling candy off the top shelf. We chowed down on the goodies in Tier 1 and now, well, it’s all down to scraping the bottom of the barrel—literally and figuratively.
New wells? Haha, yeah about that. Lemme tell ya, the economics behind drilling new holes is like trying to justify splurging on overpriced concert tickets when you’ve got rent due—it doesn’t add up. Especially not at $65 a barrel, not when you’ve got steel tariffs jousting about adding extra layers of unpredictability. Big oil’s probably hunkering down, counting pennies.
Hold your breath: today the WTI crude decided to do a little jig upward! Up by 85 whole cents! Makes you wanna believe in luck, doesn’t it? So now it’s doing a cool $60.90, strutting around like it’s got something to prove while the risk assets decided to join it. Hey, oil’s gonna oil, right?
