Saudi government officials ”haven’t said they’re going to crush the U.S. oil and gas industry, but it’s a foregone conclusion,” Sankey said in an interview. Meanwhile, “low oil prices is one of the things [Trump] can point to as a promise delivered.”

Since he returned to the Oval Office, the benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil price has fallen from $80 a barrel to $60 (see chart 1). That is a problem for the country’s shale patch, which accounts for around two-thirds of domestic output—and for smaller producers in particular,

Terrel Hardin was at a diner along Route 66 in western Oklahoma when his phone rang with bad news: The engine on one of his oil rigs had broken. In times past it would be a straightforward $6,000 fix,