Oil is trading at its lowest level in nearly four years. Costs are rising. And Wall Street is growing more worried by the day that President Trump’s trade policies will tip the United States into a recession.
The reaction in the oil patch? Silence, mostly.
Oil and gas executives, eager to stay in Mr. Trump’s good graces, have offered little public criticism of the president or the tariffs he has rolled out over the past few months. In private, however, they have decried the uncertainty he has sown, including in a recent anonymized survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
If U.S. oil prices fall much lower than $60 a barrel, around where they were trading on Monday, companies could be forced to slow drilling, slash spending and most likely lay off workers, hurting states like Texas.
Oil executives donated millions of dollars to help elect Mr. Trump, who has championed the industry. But if the past few days are any indicator, having a friendly ear in the White House goes only so far.
“Everybody’s afraid,” said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer for Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston financial services firm.
Executives in other industries like finance and technology who have been closely aligned with Mr. Trump have gone further in urging the president to soften his trade policy.
Mr. Trump has said he wanted to reset trading relationships that he has long described as unfair to the United States.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said in a statement that the administration’s policies “benefit American consumers while also reducing regulatory burdens on energy producers, making it less costly to operate in the United States.”
Soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the oil industry did urge him to reconsider tariffs on Canadian and Mexican oil. Mr. Trump largely reversed course and also exempted energy from the tariffs he announced last week.
Even so, oil prices have plunged, as have energy company stocks. By the end of the trading day on Monday, shares in Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. oil companies, had fallen around 13 and 16 percent since Wednesday, when Mr. Trump announced his latest tariffs. Neither company made its chief executive available for an interview.
Smaller firms were faring even worse. Shares of Liberty Energy, the Denver fracking company that the energy secretary, Chris Wright, previously led, were down about 35 percent.
Compounding the effects of Mr. Trump’s trade policy, the cartel known as OPEC Plus decided last week that it would pump even more oil, beginning in May. That set off concern that supply would outstrip demand, which could weaken if the global economy slows.
“You’re at a point now where probably in every C-suite in our sector, it’s got their attention,” Tom Jorden, chief executive of Coterra Energy, one of the biggest U.S. oil and gas producers, said on Friday, when oil fetched around $62 a barrel.
Asked his opinion on the tariffs that sent global markets spiraling, Mr. Jorden demurred. “I don’t have one,” he said. “I understand that the president is choosing to do difficult things first.”
Others urged patience.
“We elected him knowing this was coming, right?” said Michael Oestmann, president of a smaller oil and gas company, Tall City Exploration IV, in West Texas. Mr. Oestmann said he hoped the market would quickly bounce back.
“You have to let it play out and see how it goes for a few weeks here at least,” he said.
Privately, executives have expressed more trepidation. Anonymous responses to a March survey of oil and gas companies by the Dallas Fed were littered with complaints about uncertainty and rising costs for materials like steel, which is subject to a 25 percent tariff.
“I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” one respondent wrote.
Another called for stability: “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry. Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal.”
When oil executives have pushed back, it has often been in response to the idea floated by Peter Navarro, a White House aide, that the administration would like oil prices as low as $50 a barrel.
“When you get down to that $50 oil that you talked about, then you’re below the point that you’re going to drill, baby, drill,” Harold Hamm, one of Mr. Trump’s biggest oil industry backers, told Bloomberg last month.
It will be some time before the recent oil-price slide shows up as lower prices at the pump. A gallon of regular gasoline averaged about $3.26 on Monday, up slightly from last week, according to the AAA motor club.
Natural-gas prices have proved more resilient to the market upheaval, insulating some companies. Still, some expressed concern that more countries would follow China’s lead in retaliating with steep tariffs on U.S. exports, including liquefied natural gas. If China’s latest round of tariffs takes effect as planned this week, U.S. gas will face taxes of nearly 50 percent.
“If natural gas gets caught in the center of this tariff war, trade war, it will have a direct negative impact,” said Matt Kurzejewski, the chief executive of Costy’s Energy Services, a Pennsylvania-based gas services company.
For now, though, Mr. Kurzejewski described himself as “cautiously optimistic” about Mr. Trump’s policies.
