Welcome to Drill, the There Will Be Fraud series.

In short, weekly episodes were going to be covering the ongoing ways at the fossil fuel

industry is using the COVID-19 pandemic to push all sorts of deregulation, secure funding

for itself and get up to various other things.

Today, I am joined by Justin McCulker.

He is a reporter for the D-Smog and he's been looking at the financial streets of the fossil

fuel industry and particularly shale gas companies for the last couple of years.

Way before anybody else, Justin was pointing out that, hey, these companies have never made

a profit.

Seems weird.

Last week, Justin published a story about how the biggest obstacles to a bailout for

shale gas companies right now might surprise you.

It's Exxon and Chevron.

Join by the American Petroleum Institute.

We get into why that is in this episode.

Here's my conversation with Justin.

Maybe I can have you start by talking a little bit about why it might be that the larger

oil companies don't want a bailout for the sort of smaller independent shale companies.

There's currently the international price war going on between the Saudis and Russia

and obviously that's driving the price of oil down, which is hurting the US industry.

What's hurting the most is the shale companies because they've failed to make money for the

past decade and have a lot of debts that they need to pay back.

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