NEW YORK, NY — “Energy investors have taken bets for years on what they thought was an important indicator of future energy production: the weekly rig count data provided by oil service firms.
They may want to be careful about how much money they put on the table.
A Reuters analysis of the data, and interviews with officials at companies involved in collecting and compiling it, shows that it may sometimes be an arbitrary and misleading gauge subject to revisions.
The culprit appears to be the fracking boom and the complex geology that has made it much more difficult to decide whether a rig is likely to discover oil or gas in large quantities, often leading companies to rely on guesswork when drilling begins.”
— Edward McAllister, Reuters
