The collapse of fuel prices reached a new milestone this week: $35 crude oil. It’s a price that cements deeper turmoil in the U.S. oil industry next year, figuring into ongoing corporate investment planning that will determine whether thousands of Houston energy workers will be kept on the payrolls in 2016. At $35 a barrel, even the most efficient U.S. shale drillers can’t sell a barrel of oil for a profit. “Nothing is economic at today’s prices,” said James West, an analyst at Evercore ISI, a firm that has warned a third or more of the players in land rigs, well stimulation and other types of oil field services could cease to exist next year. West Texas crude this week fell 11 percent in its largest weekly decline of the year. Traders recoiled after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries signaled it won’t restrain its crude production. And the […]