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With Bankruptcies Mounting, Faltering Oil and Gas Firms Are Leaving a Multi-billion Dollar Cleanup Bill to the Public

With Bankruptcies Mounting, Faltering Oil and Gas Firms Are Leaving a Multi-billion Dollar Cleanup Bill to the Public

Amid a record wave of bankruptcies, the U.S. oil and gas industry is on the verge of defaulting on billions of dollars in environmental cleanup obligations.

The Bakken Boom Goes Bust With No Money to Clean up the Mess

The Bakken Boom Goes Bust With No Money to Clean up the Mess

More than a decade ago, fracking took off in the Bakken shale of North Dakota and Montana, but the oil rush that followed has resulted in major environmental damage, risky oil transportation without regulation, pipeline permitting issues, and failure to produce profits. Now, after all of that, the Bakken oil

Bankers and Investors Finding Fracking Industry’s Underlying Models Prove Overly Optimistic

Bankers and Investors Finding Fracking Industry’s Underlying Models Prove Overly Optimistic

Bloomberg recently reported that Mike Lister, a JP Morgan energy banker, estimated that banks wrote off approximately $1 billion in reserve based loans for shale companies in 2019, exceeding their total losses for the past 30 years, and that trend is expected to continue.

Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud?

Is the U.S. Fracking Boom Based on Fraud?

In a 2016 interview with Fraud Magazine, former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow explained what he thought made him so successful while at the former energy corporation that’s now infamous for financial scandal. “I think my ability to do structured financing, to finance things off-balance sheet and to find ways

Fracking in 2018: Another Year of Pretending to Make Money

Fracking in 2018: Another Year of Pretending to Make Money

2018 was the year the oil and gas industry promised that its darling, the shale fracking revolution, would stop focusing on endless production and instead turn a profit for its investors. But as the year winds to a close, it’s clear that hasn’t happened.

Flip This Well: How Fracking Company CEOs Get Rich While Losing Billions

Flip This Well: How Fracking Company CEOs Get Rich While Losing Billions

Last year the fracking company Halcón Resources announced a new strategy that was sold as the path to profits for the previously troubled shale oil and gas firm. The company had sold its stake in the Bakken oil fields in order to double down on the Permian shale in Texas.