June 17, 2016, Stansberry
Why the credit crisis is about to intensify... When 'proven'
reserves are just a pipe dream... Major revisions coming to oil company balance
sheets... Downgrades soar in corporate credit... Trouble coming: BlackRock
launches a new 'fallen angels' fund... Porter live, without a net...
Oh, dear friends... do I have a story for you...Below you
will find quite a tale. It involves hubris, money, corruption, greed, and human
folly. I don't tell this tale merely to point out the stupidity of others. I
have made all of these mistakes in my own business and with my own investing.
But the scale of these mistakes... They're massive. They're
big enough to cripple your financial well-being and the financial stability of
our country. But don't skip ahead. Just enjoy the story. At the end, you'll see
you have plenty of time to learn what you should do about all of this.
One minor point before we begin... I haven't
"dumbed" this down. You're probably going to be unfamiliar with a few
of the phrases and concepts. I remind you that there's no such thing as
teaching; only learning. Please, do your best to read carefully. Google
definitions for words you don't know.
In my view, there's only one way to tell this story... even
though some of the critical facts are a little arcane. I hope you'll recognize
that I wrote it... and wrote it this way... because I doubt anyone else will
ever explain this to you... At least not before it's too late to protect
yourself.
In 2009, the domestic
oil and gas industry lobbied the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
to change the way companies could account for "proven" energy
reserves.
The issue was critical to oil firms because, generally, only
"proven" oil reserves can be used as collateral for bank loans and
large lines of credit. Likewise, most investment banks will only underwrite
bond issues based on "proven" reserves. So to access the capital
markets; to borrow money, issue bonds, or sell shares; oil companies need
proven reserves and those reserves need to grow, year after year.
What's a proven reserve? The SEC requires a two-part test
for oil companies. First, proven reserves must be verified by a third-party
engineering firm. The oil really has to be there. And second, the company must
be able to produce the oil in question at a profit based on average oil prices.
After all, the oil in the ground is going to be used as collateral for loans.
If it can't be produced profitably and in a timely manner, then it's not
economically valuable.
The oil companies argued that shale formations as opposed to
much-harder-to-hit conventional reservoirs; changed the meaning of
"proven." After all, with a few dozen test wells and some basic
seismic data, companies could know a great deal about exactly where the shale
assets were located and how much oil they contained. Dry holes were now a thing
of the past. These new factors, the companies explained, should allow them to
"count" far more of their undeveloped assets as "proven"
regardless of how much more equipment and time it might require to actually
produce the oil.
The argument had merit. The companies weren't lying about
the existence of all of this new oil or the nature of their production
abilities. Those things were all "proven."
Take Texas' Eagle Ford Shale field, for example. Sure, there
might not have been any drilling rigs for miles around in the early to
mid-2000s. But test well results and core samples taken at the time showed the
existence of huge amounts of hydrocarbons. In only the last seven years, more
than 1.5 billion barrels of oil have already been extracted from this one giant
field.
So... the SEC agreed. In 2009, the government began to allow
companies to count as "proven" any known reserves of oil that could
be profitably produced within five years. What could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps the fine young men and women of the SEC should have
spent a little more time thinking about economics... or the poet Robert
Burns... and a little less time being entertained by oil men at Billy Bob's in
Fort Worth. For as Burns wrote about a mouse in 1786...
In proving foresight may be vain... the best laid schemes o
mice and men often go awry... and leave us nothing but grief and pain...
You will never guess what happened next...
Following the rule change in 2009, U.S. oil companies began
to book massive increases in "proven" reserves. Most of these
reserves, however, couldn't possibly be put into production for years... or
decades.
Since 2008, more than half of the growth in domestic
"proven" reserves has been counted on wells that have never been
drilled.
These "maybe someday" wells powered the incredible
10 billion-barrel increase to proven reserves during the shale boom. And these
"maybe someday" wells underlie most of the fixed-income and bank
loans. For along with the growth in reserves came a massive credit bubble
around $250 billion in new debt, just for the onshore U.S. drillers. Before the
rule changed, undrilled "proven" reserves accounted for less than 25%
of all "proven" reserves. Today, they account for almost half.
And so... what happens now?
We have some idea by looking at numbers published last year
by the oil company Continental Resources (CLR). The SEC requires that companies
adjust the current value of their "proven" reserves each year by
calculating the "present value" of the cash flows that would accrue
to the firms by producing their proven reserves. These numbers are meant to
show the real underlying value of the company's proven reserves, a number that
banks and investors can then "safely" lend against. But the outcome
of the exercise depends entirely on what assumptions you make about the price
of oil and how long it takes to produce the oil.
To estimate the oil price, companies are required to take
the price of oil on the first day of each month for the preceding 12 months and
to use them to form an "average" oil price. Thus, when reserve
figures were calculated for the annual reports filed in early 2015, companies
were still enjoying a relatively high average price of oil ($95 a barrel)
despite the fact that oil had crashed.
Continental thought that the official accounting had the
potential to seriously mislead investors. So in a subsequent filing, the
company came clean. If you assumed the current price of oil ($50 a barrel)
rather than the average price the SEC required, the company said 61% of the
value of its assets would disappear a loss of $13.8 billion.
This year, the official, SEC-approved price of oil was $50 a
barrel. As a result, huge amounts of "proven" oil reserves have
disappeared. So far, 59 U.S. oil and gas companies have written off 20% of
their reserves, an amount equal to more than 9 billion barrels of oil. But...
the worst is yet to happen.
You see, the SEC hasn't begun to enforce the
time-to-production limitations (five years) it agreed to in its 2009 reserve
changes.
Take Ultra Petroleum (UPL). In 2014, the SEC warned the
company that its development plan to drill its backlog over 13 years meant that
the company was not in compliance with its five-year horizon for proven
reserves. The company ignored the warning and used its aggressive assumptions
to raise $850 million in new debt. The SEC warned the company twice more to
revise its proven-reserves figures based on a five-year development plan. None
of these problems were disclosed to investors until a footnote mentioned the
issue in its 2015 annual report, published earlier this year. By then, the
company's shares were trading for less than a dollar and its bonds were trading
for less than $0.10 on the dollar a wipeout for investors in the 2014 bond
offering.
The company filed for bankruptcy on April 29, owing $3.9
billion to banks and bondholders.
It's always difficult and usually impossible to predict the
price of oil. But when you look at the fundamentals of the oil market, it's
hard to envision a scenario in which prices could stay above $50 a barrel for
long.
Above that price, the domestic industry begins adding
drilling rigs and completing additional wells that have already been drilled,
thereby increasing production.
We've seen that again over the last few days. For the week
ending June 10, the domestic industry added six rigs, the first increase in
about a year. Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources (a leading producer
in the Bakken shale), announced he would begin completing new wells and
increasing production. And last week, the U.S. Energy Information
Administration reported that the U.S. experienced a 10,000-barrel-per-day
growth in production, the first increase in several months.
What does all of this
mean?
Well, even though U.S. oil and gas stocks have done well
over the last five months... and even though oil and gas bonds have rallied...
we don't think we're at the bottom (or even really close to it) yet. The SEC is
going to require the industry to issue revised proven-reserve estimates that
track to the firm's existing five-year development timelines. These new disclosures
will be published by third-party firms beginning in the third quarter,
according to Rick Rule, a longtime resource-sector investment banker who
recently visited our offices. As Rick told us:
Three times in my life, the energy credit markets have blown
up. But this is going to be the best blowup... If the energy sector blows up in
the fashion that I believe it will, sorting through that wreckage will probably
be the last extraordinary buying opportunity I will have in my career.
The combination of further weakness in the price of oil and
devastating new reserve write-offs due to delayed development timelines will
certainly result in more credit defaults and more distressed credit across the
energy sector.
My research team maintains a comprehensive database of
virtually every oil and gas firm in the world in our Stansberry Data product,
the Global Oil Value Monitor. We track the asset values of these firms and
compare those figures with the company's enterprise value (its outstanding
stock and net debt). We also rank each firm according to a broad range of
quantitative data. For example, we measure its cost of production and the gross
profit margin of its operations. There are huge qualitative differences across
the sector, making this work indispensable for investors looking to profit from
this coming crisis.
Which firms are the
most likely to file for bankruptcy because of additional write-offs,
over-indebtedness, or lower-quality assets that can't be produced profitably at
current oil prices? Here are five names we would completely avoid at current
stock and bond prices, along with their total debt.
1. Southwestern
Energy (SWN), $6.4 billion
2. Chesapeake Energy
(CHK), $10.4 billion
3. MEG Energy
(MEG.TO), $3.7 billion
4. Denbury Resources
(DNR), $3.2 billion
5. SM Energy (SM),
$2.5 billion
We began to warn investors about the coming problems in
corporate credit in 2014. Last year (2015), we said that what was about to
happen would be "the largest legal transfer of wealth in history." As
corporate borrowers default, investors in senior secured loans and bonds will
end up owning trillions in corporate assets currently owned by shareholders.
The crisis continues to unfold: More than 60 U.S. companies
defaulted in the first four months of 2016 more than in all of 2015 combined
and twice as many as in 2014. Major credit-ratings agencies have downgraded
more than $1 trillion worth of debt so far this year.
There are other new
signs of severe distress approaching, at least to anyone watching the credit
markets carefully. One interesting development: BlackRock, the large investment
firm that operates the massive iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond Fund
(HYG), has recently launched a new version of this exchange-traded fund (ETF)
that excludes energy-industry bonds. It's called the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield
Ex Oil and Gas Corporate Bond Fund (HYXE).
Source:
stansberryresearch.com
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