The year that is drawing to a close has not been good for oil. Despite production caps across OPEC and beyond, and despite the extra-large number and size of production outages, benchmark prices have stubbornly stayed range-bound below what oil-reliant OPEC economies consider a good price for their product. How did this happen? First and foremost, it happened because of the U.S. shale boom, as Bloomberg’s Grant Smith wrote in a recent overview of oil in 2019. The consensus on the role of U.S. shale oil production growth seems to be unchallengeable. All oil price forecasts, including OPEC’s own, now regularly include U.S. oil production growth as the main reason for growth in non-OPEC supply that acts as counterweight to OPEC’s production curb efforts. It was U.S. shale oil production—which hit a record-high this year turning the country into the world’s top oil producer—that caused what can only be […]