Rising shale supplies also helped keep the lights on in Europe following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with shipments of US liquefied natural gas - previously labelled “molecules of US freedom” by the Trump administration - helping to wean the continent off Russian piped supplies. “If you didn’t have the shale revolution now you would have $150 oil . . . You would be in a very volatile situation. “It is a huge turnaround from where we were at in the 1970s,” said Harold Hamm, chair of Continental Resources and a shale pioneer.

The shale surge has blunted the impact of supply cuts made by Opec in the past two years, they say, and allowed President Joe Biden’s administration’s to impose sanctions on suppliers such as Venezuela and Russia, while tightening restrictions on Iran - all without fear of driving up oil prices. The strategic advantages are profound, say analysts, even for a White House eager to transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy. The prolific Permian Basin shale of Texas and New Mexico pumps more oil than Kuwait, Iraq or the UAE, three of Opec’s powerhouses. Imports from the Gulf have plummeted, and the US became a net oil exporter for the first time in 2019. Now the US produces almost 20mn b/d of petroleum, roughly on par with consumption. Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - which send oil through the Strait of Hormuz - were among the US’s most important foreign suppliers. Two decades ago the US produced about 7mn barrels a day of petroleum and consumed 21mn. “It has changed not only the supply-demand balance but it has changed the geopolitical balance and the psychological balance.” “ Shale has redrawn the map of world oil in a way most people don’t seem to understand,” said Daniel Yergin, vice-chair of S&P Global and a Pulitzer Prize-winning energy historian. The crude price calm in the face of this turmoil owes much to events 7,000 miles away in the shale fields of North Dakota and west Texas, where drillers have left global markets awash with American oil. Demonstrating its menace to the waterway, Iran seized a vessel there on April 13, the same day it launched its attack on Israel. It was a notable non-reaction from oil markets, especially given the threat Iran poses to the Strait of Hormuz, the sea lane through which passes one in every five barrels of petroleum consumed globally each day. On Monday, less than a week after the first-ever direct military strikes by Iran on Israel brought fears of a wider regional war, oil prices settled at $87 per barrel - flat versus their level just before a strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus precipitated the eruption. Last week, the fears suddenly looked overblown. In the decades since, the possibility that new strife in the Middle East could deliver another administration-ending jump in oil and petrol prices has hung like a spectre over the White House.

In 19 war in Israel and turmoil in Iran twice ruptured the oil market, triggering an inflationary surge that sapped western economies and unseated a US president. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Continental finance surge