The “mother-frackers” of shale now resemble OPEC

AN HOUR AFTER dawn Scott Sheffield is at the window of his 2,300-acre (930-hectare) Forked Lightning ranch in New Mexico, contemplating a day’s fishing. The estate, formerly owned by Jane Fonda, has four miles of river running through it. It’s muddy at the moment, he says, but on a good day a fly fisherman can easily pull out 20 or so rainbow trout. It is a dreamy-sounding place, with pine-covered cliffs and roving elk. It is another world from the tumbleweed-strewn oilfields of West Texas where Mr Sheffield was once dubbed the “mother-fracker” for his role in turning the Permian Basin into the mother lode of America’s shale boom.The last time your columnist spoke to Mr Sheffield, five years ago, the co-founder and boss of Pioneer Natural Resources was the Permian’s greatest free-market evangelist. It was the heyday of the shale revolution. Pioneer was in the middle of a drilling bonanza that pushed its oil output up by an average of 15-20% a year for a decade. All the money it earned, it reinvested into fracking even more shale wells. Mr Sheffield was fond of comparing the Permian with Ghawar, Saudi Arabia’s biggest oilfield.