A lot of the news on tariffs and some of the posturing by industry groups has got me thinking back to the days of Covid.

Mainly looking at it from the domestic oil&gas side of the business, the drilling industry and the nation itself avoided an absolute catastrophe (more than was already the case from Covid) due to the unique nature of the lockdowns. Imports by both air and sea plummeted for a few months, but from there had been so many rigs stacked (drop of 60% in a two month period), that there was so much spare equipment to cannibalize from the stacked rigs that nobody ran out of stuff.

What happens if we try to keep 600 rigs running in a war-time environment with China? What happens to every other industry dependent on imports to run?

I bring this up because I've seen a lot from IADC pressuring the White House to do something about tariffs as it's impacting operations and threatening energy independence. The problem I've got is that you can't have both a thriving domestic industry while getting all your products from overseas; and major operators and contractors just aren't going to pay the cost required to use American steel and manufacturing.

Lol you're hypothetical focuses on what if scenarios of tariff induced trade interruptions but wholly assumes we go to war with china?

Sims said:

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Lol you're hypothetical focuses on what if scenarios of tariff induced trade interruptions but wholly assumes we go to war with china?

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No, the tariffs are in regards to artificially supporting industry in case we go to war with China, or there's another massive virus over there, etc etc.

I think the most important thing to focus on is what actually stops compared to what you (we, all of us) are being told will or has stopped.

At one point, the grocery store shelves were supposed to be empty. That was true because they were filiming in city owned crap grocery stores. They weren't filming at HEB in Frisco.

The tariffs have received such apoplectic news coverage that it's hard to believe anything other than what you see personally.

For us, we spend about $60M annually on raw steel plate, flanges, valves, metering equipment etc..We have been restricting our sourcing to non-China, non-Russian sources for years. China imports could stop completely, and we would see a price increase but we'd likely see little to no interruption in supply. There are other industries they may be single sourced from China and I'm not acutely aware of which.

Ultimately, there are other opportunities to source goods. Supply chain, given notice, is sophisticated enough to get what it needs. Critical industries will be served, domestics will stack up more critical spares, heavily capitlized operators will excel where cash strapped companies may not.

Lastly, it's important to remember that the liberation day tariffs lasted all of about 8 hours. Trump saw the market reaction and adjusted course. Maybe that won't happen next time but the evidence we have says he is open to course adjustment.

Whatever happened to the inbound cargo ships to ports being nonexistent?

I'm pretty sure in this scenario we call Bruce Willis to change the transmissions on the drilling rigs himself and thereby saving the world.

Can't not share this given the context of the thread.