Oil industry faces lower prices

HOUSTON, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- A drop in oil prices from a record high of $147 a barrel this summer to $46.10 Thursday has squeezed the U.S. oil industry, analysts said.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that with cooling oil prices has come a desire to tap new domestic sources.

"Six months ago everything was roses, and nobody in this business had any inkling that oil prices would decline virtually $100 a barrel," said Alex Mills, president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. Now, he added, "some people have already pulled back on their drilling programs."

The accounting firm BDO Seidman LLP said 57 percent of the chief financial officers at U.S. oil and gas companies said "credit capacity restraints" will likely be their most significant challenge in the coming year.

Falling prices were their No. 2 concern, the newspaper reported.

The industry has endured down cycles before and will again, says Sara Banaszak, an economist with the American Petroleum Institute, an industry lobbying group. She said producers and drillers will likely back off more expensive, or marginal, operations.

"When demand is high, more marginal resources will go into production," said Banaszak, adding that "higher-price areas will come out of production .... The marginal fields are the ones that respond to changes in price and demand."