" The shale production that is entering the market and pushing other sources of supply that used to come to the U.S. away from the U.S. and they are trying to find markets for that."
Chevron said it would record impairments of more than $10bn in its fourth quarter. More than half of the write-down comes from shale assets in the Appalachian region.
At the same time, the U.S., having edged closer to energy independence with natural gas and oil shale, no longer needed Riyadh the way it once did, and was noticeably less attentive.
Like wind power, this has boomed in America over the past couple of decades, with the rise of shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of rocks.
He held out the prospect of exporting shale gas to Europe if a prospective trade agreement between the two powers were signed. But he added that Europe should not rely on US gas.
And so the state consequently had a massive, massive amount of petroleum-rich shale rock deposits beneath its surface, ripe for the new fracking technique to exploit.
The pigments were discovered after researchers crushed 1.1bn-year-old rocks found in a marine shale deposit, beneath the Sahara desert, in the Taoudeni basin in Mauritania, west Africa.
The American oil firm Chevron has suspended test drilling for shale gas in Romania after anti-fracking protesters broken into a site northeast of the capital Bucharest.
The book's main strength is the clarity with which the author explains the development of shale exploitation and assesses the implications of the shale boom.