Consumers Sue U.S. Shale Alleging Collusion to Boost Oil Prices

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U.S. shale producers have been preaching and practicing capital discipline since the price crash of 2020 and haven’t deviated from their pledge to focus on shareholder returns instead of oil production growth since then.

Some of the biggest independent U.S. shale firms may have started to finally please investors with meaningful returns, but they have angered consumers.

Some of these consumers of retail gasoline, diesel, and marine fuels allege that the ‘discipline’ in capital allocation has actually been a collusion to boost the price of oil and pad oil firms’ bottom lines by withholding production to the market, not too different from what OPEC is doing with crude supply.

And these consumers are taking some of the top U.S. shale producers to court where the companies are called to answer allegations of fixing and keeping oil prices elevated by constraining domestic production.

The class action lawsuits were filed months before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) barred early this month Pioneer Natural Resources’ former CEO Scott Sheffield from gaining a seat on Exxon’s board of directors or serving in an advisory capacity at Exxon once it acquires Pioneer.

The FTC alleges in a complaint that Sheffield has, through public statements and private communications, attempted to collude with OPEC and OPEC+ “to reduce output of oil and gas, which would result in Americans paying higher prices at the pump, to inflate profits for his company.”

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While most of the lawsuits alleging anti-competitive behavior in the sector preceded the regulator’s move, the FTC complaint against Sheffield rattled the U.S. shale industry.

This FTC complaint could now serve as a starting point for lawyers in class action lawsuits to seek to unearth evidence of collusion in the industry, legal experts told the Financial Times.

The latest class action antitrust litigation lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, in which Permian Resources, ExxonMobil, Pioneer Natural Resources, Centennial Resource Development, Chesapeake Energy, Continental Resources, Diamondback Energy, EOG Resources, Hess Corporation, and Occidental Petroleum were named as defendants.

This isn’t the first time consumers have sued major shale producers alleging anticompetitive behavior.

In January this year, residents of Nevada, Hawaii, and Maine filed a lawsuit against nine U.S. producers accusing them of padding their profits and ripping off consumers by engaging in anticompetitive behavior and collusion to withhold oil production and boost oil prices.

The class action complaint filed in a Nevada court says that “This action arises from Defendants’ conspiracy to coordinate, and ultimately constrain, domestic shale oil production, which has had the effect of fixing, raising, and maintaining the price of retail gasoline (gasoline purchased by consumers at gas stations) in and throughout the United States of America.”

In 2022, when oil rallied after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the defendants – being “agile swing producers” whose breakeven prices “have never been lower and who operate in regions with a wealth of profitable opportunities” had the perfect market conditions to aggressively increase production, the plaintiffs said.

“But Defendants did not take advantage of this market opportunity. Rather, departing from their historical practice and rational independent self-interest, each Defendant limited their domestic shale production growth,” the lawsuit alleges.

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“Private class-action lawyers will no doubt try and follow those FTC breadcrumbs in discovery in their own cases,” Eric Grannon, an antitrust lawyer at White & Case, told FT.

The FTC complaint against Pioneer’s Sheffield does not have any legal effect or bearing in the class action lawsuits and it’s not certain it is actual evidence of collusion, Grannon noted.

“A unilateral statement by an executive, even to their competitors, that it’s in their common interest to raise prices or cut output is not a violation of the antitrust laws,” Grannontold FT.

“It’s only a violation if there’s agreement.”

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Why aren’t this idiots also filing lawsuits against cattle ranchers? With the current beef prices as high as they are, why isn’t every rancher sending its entire herd immediately to slaughter? Why isn’t the beef industry flooding grocery stores with massive increased amounts of beef in order to bring the price per pound down?

Oh…by the way, the shale companies are the reason there is record oil production in the United States, producing oil at a higher rate than any other country in history.