It is less than two months since Donald Trump travelled to Texas to declare that the US energy industry, laid low by this year’s oil price crash, was back on its feet. “We’re OK now,” the president told the assembled crowd.
But bankruptcy numbers released this week tell a different story. Another 16 upstream US oil and gas companies — producers and service providers — hit the wall in August, the same number as in July, according to law firm Haynes and Boone.
Bigger drillers such as Chaparral and Valaris have joined a pile-up that has seen companies with a combined $85bn worth of debt file for protection from creditors over the past eight months.
“We’re continuing to see a steady stream of oil and gas producer bankruptcies and oilfield service bankruptcies. And we do not anticipate any immediate interruption in that steady stream, especially on the oilfield service side,” said Charles Beckham, a partner at Haynes and Boone.
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