While acknowledging that U.S. shale growth is slowing down, analysts and experts continue to predict that total American crude oil production will rise by around 1 million barrels per day in 2020. But U.S. exploration and production companies, the ones with the boots on the ground in the Permian and other major American shale plays, acknowledge that the slowdown is and will be much worse than what the EIA, the International Energy Agency (IEA), or OPEC predict. Many U.S. oil and gas firms are cutting capital expenditure plans and production targets for 2020, squeezed between the scarce availability of capital from debt and equity markets and investors demanding returns. Capital discipline, combined with firms having to move to Tier 2 and 3 locations to drill and parent-child well issues, has the U.S. shale patch saying that current forecasts about U.S. production growth are too optimistic and not taking into […]