The Texas economy has suffered a double blow from COVID-19 crisis and the collapse of the oil industry. U.S. shale drillers had already planned on cutting capex this year by 10 to 15 percent, even before the pandemic. “Coming into 2020, many exploration and production firms faced an inability to produce attractive returns amid heavy debt burdens and an oversupplied oil market. Investors had grown skeptical of the sector,” the Dallas Federal Reserve said in a report . But drilling has gone from merely a “slowdown” to a more extreme sudden stop. The rig count has plunged by more than half. All told, the sector could spend 40 percent less this year compared to 2019, with much of the contraction concentrated in the second quarter. “While U.S. oil production growth was already on the verge of leveling off due in part to the steep output-decline rate of existing wells, […]