Russian oligarchs, Iranian clerics, Texan tycoons: The list of Saudi Arabia’s supposed targets reads like a James Bond cast of characters. The real victims could be a more prosaic bunch: Calgary real estate agents. The de facto leader of OPEChas spooked the oil market with its seeming indifference to falling prices, apparently prioritizing market share even as demand growth weakens. Saudi Arabia’s stance makes sense. Propped-up prices, while helpful in the near term, also encourage competing supplies and demand conservation. Letting prices fall may, instead, force higher-cost rivals to throttle back. Russia and Iran are said to be on the hit list, but North America is definitely there. Why else do Saudi Arabian officials keep speculating on the price that will shut down shale? The latest such estimate, reported in The Wall Street Journal, is $70 a barrel. That would be $16 below the current Brent oil price and the lowest since May 2010. Even so, it wouldn’t derail U.S. shale quickly. Investors are used to thinking in terms of the return on an oil project over its lifetime. But for an exploration-and-production company, this doesn’t necessarily make sense. If one already has sunk millions into buying land and securing licenses and access to infrastructure, then the real benchmark for drilling is the return from that point on.