For they saw the abundance of shale oil and gas as an adjunct to U.S. foreign policy, giving the U.S. a free hand to impose sanctions on the Russian energy sector, as it had done only a few months earlier, in forcing a halt to the almost-completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline. U.S. shale, they expected, would inevitably be a major casualty of a price war, owing to its higher costs and the constant drilling it required, compared to Saudi and Russian conventional oil.
