U.S. shale producers have behaved in an exemplary way in the past year. It wasn’t something the industry wanted to do. It was something it was forced to do by the pandemic and by its shareholders, who after years of waiting for windfalls put their foot down and demanded higher returns. But it just might be time for a change. U.S. shale must by now be used to the price shocks. Even so, the pandemic-driven destruction of demand for crude must have hurt. On top of that pain, the large public shale producers had many unhappy shareholders to deal with. They dealt with them by cutting spending, slashing production, and focusing on cash flow generation. They largely did it with some help from OPEC+, which cut an unprecedented 7.7 million bpd from its combined production, and some non-OPEC producers that stepped in to shoulder part of the burden. Since […]