re: Who here has been affected by the drop in oil and gas prices?

Its starting to look bad for me and I'm not even in the O&G industry. We recently merged with another company that does professional services for O&G. They're laughably inefficient but they pay us so thats good. We can ride it out for another year or so but I honestly don't see oil prices going back up very much in the next 5 years. There will be temporary spikes here and there where we will flood the market with shale and push the prices back down.

Many other sectors and regions will benefit tremendously from cheaper energy. People need to move where the money/work is. That's what our forefathers did. For O&G workers I think there will be plenty of opportunities in the refineries that are popping up in LC and other areas not to mention other construction projects around the nation. Texas, California, and Nevada are building shite left and right.

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OPEC will cut.

Many members are already howling.

Even the kingdom can't make it forever at $30-40 per barrel.

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They can't interfere and cut supply to artificially inflate the prices right now because all that will happen is that the markets will get flooded with shale oil and the prices will go back down and the Sauds will have even less money. You have to make the shale industry HURT and make them starve for several years before working the price back up to discourage re-investment in those more expensive sources.

Sort of correct

Shale wells come on strong and decline quickly. Then they level out to a moderate production rate but that production rate comes with a lot of paraffin, water and corrosion problems, subsurface and surface. So the costs to work them over and repair damage is pretty high.

There are a ton of shale wells that have been drilled but the plugs have not been drilled out. They are sitting there with water in them above and below the plugs and they are basically rotting from subsurface bacteria. So the idea that shale producers will rush into an elevated crude and NG market with new production is not totally true.

The shale producers are learning the downside of using crappy bacteria laden water in the drilling mud and having all that crappy frac water eating all of the metal subsurface and on the surface.

If there is any boom from crude and NG commodities going up it will be on the service, work over, artificial lift and production side. Some very smart people are having their asses handed to them by simplest organisms on Earth.