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‘I’m Just Living a Nightmare’: Oil Industry Braces for Devastation - The New York Times

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Well, that’s beginning to happen, but it’s a cumbersome, complex process. First of all, you have thousands of producers in the United States. We don’t have a national oil company which is taking orders from the government, such as in Saudi Arabia. And then there are complications that go along with shutting in wells. It’s an expensive process. You can actually damage the resource to the point where, when you restart the oil, you’ll actually pump less oil out. And then, you have all of these companies that, even when they’re losing money, they need cash flow. They need cash flow to meet their payroll, to meet their debt responsibilities. So what oil companies prefer to do, you let the well, basically, slowly decline.