The Permania, as someone called the oil industry and private equity rush to West Texas and New Mexico, has begun to take its toll on all those investors that saw it as the next huge thing. With production booming, pipeline capacity has become tight, and producers are forced to sell their crude at a painful discount to benchmarks. They are also losing billions in market capitalization. A recent story from Bloomberg estimated that over the last two weeks, eight of the biggest oil producers with a presence in the Permian have shed a collective US$15.6 billion in market value, or over US$1 billion per day, with some of the shares booking double-digit drops. It is an impressive turning of the tables. Just a year ago, everyone who had acreage in the Permian was a magnet for investors. The U.S. Geological Survey had upgraded the reserve estimates for the basin, […]