No. This is a nice benefit but this war just isn't about shale like the 2012 flooding was. This conflict originated from a spat between Russia and Saudi Arabia and will end when they settle their differences.
A large part of that spat is that Russia still thinks it can drive out the US shale producers whereas Saudi Arabia is done fighting for now. Moscow has a $150 billion warchest whereas Riyadh is bleeding money and risking the biggest IPO in history.
It's way more complex than that. This is completely between the Saudi's and Russians. US shale is just a unintended consequence (tho temporarily good for them.)
Damage to US shale is unintended and the Saudi's know it will be very temporary. The US companies have a near endless supply of capital, especially now with the federal government being on a spending spree. The shale fields can be easily turned off and on. Loans can be restructured and renegotiated. The last time the Saudi's tried to aim their efforts at the US it ACTUALLY caused the US shale oil companies to consolidate, innovate and they brought their production costs down significantly! The US oil industry is extremely resilient.
The goal for the Saudi's is to bring the Russians to the negotiating table and get them to agree to a meaningful cut in oil production, nothing less than 1 million bpd. They've basically said this. Their strategy is completely aimed at the Russians. The Saudi's are filling EVERY port and transfer station in the world with their cheap crude. The Russians transport all their oil in pipelines. If demand drops for Russian oil, they will be forced to turn off their wells because their pipelines can't handle extra oil, and the Russians have no where to store the extra. The Russians don't want to turn off their oil wells because its dangerous, it usually takes them offline for a long time, and they're expensive to get started again.
>The goal for the Saudi's is to bring the Russians to the negotiating table
the current oil skirmish is a part of much bigger war - Russia went into Syria and has supported the Shia belt (Hezbollah - Asad - Iraqi Shia government - Iran) against Sunni (ISIS/Saudis) despite having no religious preference between Shia/Sunni in particular to block Saudis from being able to pipeline the stuff to Europe (which is an oil and especially natural gas market critical to Putin's Russia survival, and where Saudis have been trying for example to send oil and LNG tankers to. The LNG is more expensive than pipelined NG while Saudis have a lot of NG, so they need a pipeline to Europe and that would be existential blow to the current Russia economy and its "soft" power (like the threat of turning gas off in winter) power over Europe). In this context i don't see Russia going to negotiate wrt. current skirmish. If anything i think it would go all the way in Stalingrad style, Russian population economical suffering be damned, in hopes of forcing Saudis to come to bigger negotiations in much weaker shape.
Someone (Matt Levine??) on Bloomberg said that "Russia and Saudi Arabia seem to have accepted that periodically bankrupting US fracking operations is a cost of business". Periodically - because US oil extraction is done by many firms in a country with strong bankruptcy law, and after 2 or 3 years SA and RU will stop dumping, prices will rise, and they'll spring right up again (barring some drastic change in world oil consumption.) So it's more like Don'tlose-don'tlose-losetemporarily.
> Before that you are going to need every drop of that oil.
No, you’re not. You want to fundamentally damage oil production economics to make oil as expensive as possible, to speed the uptake of EVs.
Cheap oil slows down the electrification of transportation. We don’t want cheap oil. We want this price war to cause a spike in oil prices causing pain to oil consumers.
Sure but that statistic is always measured as oil + natural gas + additives + other hydrocarbons. If you can find a source for crude oil extraction, not production, the US would almost certainly not be #1.
Recently the US has been far in the lead for even crude production. Here is a source where you can see the break downs by type for every country from from 1973 to 2018[1]. Data from the US Energy Information Administration. Download the .csv file for easier browsing.
The totals for just crude, not including petroleum liquids, for 2018 are: