Recently, the former CEO of the largest shale gas producer in the United States told a roomful of conference goers what any competent financial analysis would have revealed many years ago: the shale oil and gas industry as a whole has been destroying capital since its inception. “The fact is that every time they put the drill bit to the ground, they erode the value of the billions of dollars of previous investments they have made,” said Steve Schlotterbeck, former head of natural gas behemoth EQT, at a petrochemical industry conference. “It’s frankly no wonder that their equity valuations continue to fall dramatically.” But, the real news here is not that the shale oil and gas industry has from its beginning been destroying capital one well at a time. It’s that a major industry insider freed from the constraints of his former job has admitted it. Schlotterbeck calculates that […]