Global Supply Chain Week Day 5 preview: Energy, chemicals and mining

Energy’s future and its recent rough past will be the focus of discussions Feb. 26, the fifth day of FreightWaves’ Global Supply Chain Week.

The day’s focus on energy, chemicals and mining will kick off with an interview conducted by FreightWaves Executive Publisher Kevin Hill, who sits down with Benjamin Shattuck, director of Wood Mackenzie’s Lower 48 team. The exploration and production activity in the lower 48 of the U.S. has had a wild year with a plunge in prices followed by a slowly rising market that at the time of his interview may have crude oil prices at levels right where they were before the pandemic.

But at the same time, it’s a business that needs a constant infusion of new lending and is a target of divestiture, either for political or business reasons. Shattuck will speak on the need for that capital, whether the industry will get enough of it and whether that may impact it in the future.

Looking back a bit, interviewer John Kingston will speak with two trucking executives from Texas on how they handled the pandemic that flattened prices and sent drilling activity plunging in the first half of 2020, with a recovery in the second half of the year. John Esparaza is the president of the Texas Trucking Association and Bob McDowell is the president and owner of W.M. Dewey & Son Inc., a trucking company serving the oil patch. The two of them discuss how tough it got as the industry imploded around them and what steps they took to bring back the Dewey business or in the case of Esparza, the businesses of so many of the association’s members.