Saudi price war against shale
At the OPEC meeting on November 27, 2014, Saudi Arabia rejected calls to cut production and instead held its output level — deliberately letting prices fall in an effort to drive higher-cost American shale producers out of business. Brent crude dropped from $115 in June to $50 by January 2015 and below $30 in early 2016. The strategy partially worked — shale production growth stalled and dozens of small producers went bankrupt — but it did not break the industry. By 2017 American shale was rebounding with lower break-even costs, and Saudi Arabia had absorbed roughly $400 billion in lost revenue, the equivalent of two years of full government spending. The price war demonstrated the limits of the OPEC swing-producer strategy in a multi-source oil market.
Saudi Arabia drew down hundreds of billions from its foreign reserves to maintain government spending during the price war, leading to the first sustained current-account deficits in two decades. The fiscal pressure of that period is widely cited as a driver of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 reform program, which assumes the petrodollar revenue base will continue eroding.
05 · The Transition
Three energy revolutions are running simultaneously. American shale fracking has made the U.S. the world's largest oil and gas producer for the first time since 1973. Solar and battery costs have collapsed by 80 to 90 percent in fifteen years, with China dominating both production and the rare-earth supply chain. And weaponized energy — Russia's gas cuts to Europe, Western sanctions on Russian oil, the price-cap mechanism, the Nord Stream sabotage — has demonstrated that the petrodollar system can be unwound, in pieces, in months. The wealth ranking of the next era is being decided right now, and not all of the candidates know they're competing.
Read the full era →- 2008 — 2014U.S. shale oil revolution
- 2010 — 2024Solar electricity becomes the cheapest power
- 2017 — presentCobalt and lithium become geopolitical
- Apr 20, 2020Oil futures go negative
- Sep 26, 2022Nord Stream pipelines sabotaged
- Dec 5, 2022First fusion ignition at NIF
- Aug 16, 2022Inflation Reduction Act passed