Shale Oil Explorers Face a Cautious Buyer’s Market

由于崩溃价格和山区债务挤压的页岩油钻机为资助的私募股权和工业投资者提供了诱人的目标。“石油是世界上最大的投资机会，”顶级私募股权金融家Blackstone集团的董事长兼首席执行官Stephen Schwarzman在瑞士达沃斯的最后冬季世界经济论坛上宣布。

然而，这shale oil sectorhas seen no deals of any heft in the eight months since then. Denver-based Whiting Petroleum Corp., the largest producer inNorth Dakota’s Bakken Shale formation3月份,公开出售本身。没有隋tors have appeared, even though Whiting’s shares have since fallen another 40 percent, to about $19 as of October 5. (They peaked 13 months ago, at $93.) “Everyone is beginning to ask, ‘Where’s the beef?’” says Deborah Byers, head of the U.S. oil and gas practice for Ernst & Young in Houston.

Some meat may appear on the table before the end of this year as sellers grow more desperate and creditors more restive. But the shale patch’s dispersed ownership, an ever-gloomier outlook for oil prices and some past investment debacles mean that restructuring will likely be drawn out and incremental, lacking the blockbuster acquisitions that might fulfill Schwarzman’s prognostication.

潜在的买家缺乏干粉。仅纽约的黑石表示，它已为能源投资提高了100亿美元。克莱尔小组等竞争对手，KKR＆Co。和Warburg Pincus已经放弃了40亿美元。即使是这些数字也是由石油专业的一次性资源促成的。埃克森美孚公司总部位于德克萨斯州欧文，拥有超过220亿美元的资金股票，回购累计并作为收购货币提供;基于加利福尼亚州的San Ramon Chevron Corp.坐在550亿美元的股票和现金。

Meanwhile, the financial noose is set to tighten around struggling operators. October will see a semiannual wave of so-called redeterminations by bank lenders, when they reassess the value of borrowers’ collateral in the ground and could slash credit lines accordingly. Drillers got through this process relatively unscathed in the spring amid expectations that prices would soon rebound.

“贷款人在第一季度延伸和假装，”基于波士顿的投资顾问Cambridge Associates的康复研究负责人Meagan Nichols说。“有很多讨论，十月将更严格。”股权和垃圾债券市场为美国上半年提供了440亿美元的美国石油生产商，在2014年下半年石油市场崩溃之前，对套期保值也越来越多地到期，烧于收入。

然而，买家正在观看与银行家相同的看跌石油前景。今年夏天，美国能源信息管理局（EIA）将2016年的预测降级为美国基准西德克萨斯州中级的平均每桶54美元。这对典型页岩油生产者来说是易于融合的。

“A price of $50 to $60 is close to sustainable in the long term. The big question is if shale producers can keep it going at $40 to $50,” says Michael Lynch, president and director of petroleum markets at Springfield, Massachusetts–based Strategic Energy and Economic Research.

Under current scenarios, shale offers few of the pickings that private equity investors traditionally prefer: companies with reliable cash flows that could take on more debt and be managed more aggressively. The industry is suffering from the aggression it showed and the debt it took on in better days.

The obvious restructuring play in shale is to grab undrilled leases from distressed operators at knock-down prices, then sit on those properties until prices rise again. Unlike the huge fields oil majors exploit over the course of decades, shale wells require relatively low up-front investment and are largely exhausted after a year, making it easier for owners to time production to market conditions.

许多公司现在无法停止钻探，因为他们欠了太多。根据EIA的报告，在过去12个月中，83％的行业现金流量已经达到服务债务。

But accumulating leases means eventually putting together a corporate structure to exploit them, unfamiliar territory for many private equity firms. “Some of the juicier plays may be too large in scale for private equity players, or the assets need an operator,” Ernst & Young’s Byers says.

替代方案正在参与复杂和有争议的债务重组，这是在破产后最容易进行的。已经为今年第11章提交了一半的页岩油钻机，而是最大的名字，如Whiting和俄克拉荷马城的Chesapeake Energyce Corp.自1月1日起沉没了三分之二，正在悬挂。

One more reason buyers may go slow on shale is that private equity and industry investors have already been burned badly in this volatile business. The biggest of the shale oil bankruptcies so far has been that of Tulsa, Oklahoma–based Samson Resources, which filed for relief from $4.2 billion in debt on September 16. Samson’s largest shareholder is New York’s KKR, which led a group of investors shelling out $4 billion for the company in 2011.

在石油专业中，埃克森莫比尔在2010年6月起到了410亿美元的股票购买Shale-Gas生产商XTo Energy，当时基准Henry Hub U.S.天然气价格达到近5美元Btus。今天他们徘徊在2.50美元左右。埃克森美孚首席执行官Rex Tillerson早在公司的2013年股东大会上被录取，收购沃思堡，基于德克萨斯州的XTO一直是“非遗传性”，因为“我们错过了，略微错过了行业的浮雕容量。”

投资者与现金包的投资者不会完全忽略一个可以蓬勃发展的行业展开的火灾销售。即使是KKR准备在其Samson Bet上删除数十亿美元，由美国对冲基金公司Anschutz投资的一组债权人，Cerberus Capital Management和Silver Point Capital提供了485,000,000美元的重组公司。XTO高管在西德克萨斯州西德克萨斯州博物馆的狩猎面积上，采用了一项新的投资策略，涉及与现有所有者共同生产而不是在9月份报告的彭博新闻。

With industry conditions set to get worse before they get better, buyers won’t rush, though. “We are saying the same thing as Schwarzman about the opportunity, but with a different time horizon,” Cambridge Associates’ Nichols says.