Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA - Oil Prices and Energy Wars: The Empire of Frack versus Russia - Strategic Culture Foundation - on-line journal > Oil Prices and Energy Wars: The Empire of Frack versus Russia > Strategic-Culture.org - Strategic Culture Foundation
Oil Prices and Energy Wars: The Empire of Frack versus Russia
Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA
Energy prices started to move downward in late-2014, when Saudi oil began to flood energy markets. Variations of two main schools about this emerged. One school explained things purely on the basis of business interests whereas the other school viewed the drop in oil prices geopolitically.
Some analysts viewed the Saudi move as a means of pushing out competitors in a saturated market with falling demands that has been caused by economic stagnation. Within this group of analysts, there were also those that viewed this as an attack on the growing shale industry in the US. According to RusEnergy analysts Mikhail Krutikhin, Saudi Arabia is trying to push US shale production out for the market by making extraction unprofitable and ultimately expanding its share of the market at the expense of US producers. [1] The decline in oil prices will hurt production in areas not controlled by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Nations (OPEC) and this may be a means of preventing the oil market from transforming from a «seller’s marker» into a «buyer’s market». [2] Others, like Lukoil’s Leonid Fedun, maintained that the US shale industry risked becoming the victim of its own success. [3]
