Part Two of multimedia journalist Jason Spiess’ interview with Brian Sullivan, “Power Lunch” Co-Anchor
Jason Spiess: About June 2014 oil started hovering around $60 and the trend was showing a declining future rather than a rebound back to $100. Oil companies started talking about future adjustments. I attended several annual meetings in October of 2014 and state officials and oil executives started giving an ominous warning about the upcoming year. When you went out to visit the shale plays across America, specifically in December of 2014, you were in the Bakken. Was it still dirt roads and $400-a-night hotel rooms?
Brian Sullivan: (Laughs) You’re right, the price of oil had come down very dramatically, very quickly, starting in October so that’s why we wanted to get back out to the shale plays. This really isn’t a complicated story global in North Dakota, Texas, no matter where you are, just look at the production numbers and the demand numbers and you see that the world has too much oil. Hard to believe, you know Peak Oil just decades ago and now too much oil. We went there to see what the follow up was. Things were still humming along because the price of oil had only been down for a couple of months. Everyone was fully committed. Contracts were in, drilling activity was high. We sat down and had dinner with a bunch of locals and various businesses and it was all very optimistic. As you can entrepreneurs would be. I think to be an entrepreneur you have to be an optimistic person.
But there was also a sense of – and I mean this with all respect because we met some very nice people up there – everyone said we are going to be fine, everything is going to be fine, it’s gonna recover, oil will bounce back. I wasn’t quite so sure. I’m just a journalist and you look at the numbers and I’m thinking that’s a lot of gap to try and make up in terms of oversupply.
Thing were still expensive. Hotels were in the $300 range. Couple of nice restaurants there. We’ve been to this place called The Williston Brewing Company all three times were were in the Bakken. Met the owner had him on the show. He’s a very successful entrepreneur in Minneapolis and other places. So we went there and the menus were expensive and crowded. They were still humming along because the price had just come down and there was a great expectation prices were going to recover very quickly. I also remember it was negative 20 degrees. (laughs) I’ve never been so cold in my life, I grew up in Southern California.
So we visited them last week as part of our third stage of the “Crude Reality: State of Pain” series.
For the network’s “Crude Reality: State of Pain” series, CNBC “Power Lunch” (M-F, 1PM-3PM ET) Co-Anchor Brian Sullivan and CNBC Special Correspondent Scott Cohn will visit states that once benefited from the country’s energy boom but are now finding themselves in a downturn due to the fall in oil prices. Over the next month, Sullivan and Cohn will travel to North Dakota, Alaska, New Mexico and Louisiana to talk with local businesses to see how they are handling the hard times and what they have planned for months and years ahead.
Brian Sullivan is co-anchor of CNBC’s “Power Lunch” (M-F, 1PM-3PM ET) and the host of “Talking Numbers.” He also writes for CNBC.com and the recently re-launched CNBC PRO.
He joined CNBC in May 2011 and is based at the network’s Global Headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Sullivan has more than 15 years of financial broadcasting experience, having served as an anchor at Fox Business Network and prior to that as producer, reporter and anchor at Bloomberg Television.
He has twice been nominated for the prestigious Loeb Award. One for being recognized as among the first financial journalists to highlight the risks of the housing bubble in 2007, and the other for the 2013 CNBC documentary “America’s Gun: The Rise of the AR-15.” Prior to joining Bloomberg in 1997, Sullivan traded chemical commodities for Mitsubishi International.
Sullivan has a B.A. in political science from Virginia Tech and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School. In 2015, he began a three-year term on the Alumni Board of Virginia Tech.
In his free time he is an avid race car driver with two SCCA divisional championships.
Follow Brian Sullivan on Twitter @SullyCNBC.
Leave a Reply