HURRAY FOR FRACKING: “OPEC is Dead.”

That statement was uttered by an OPEC official during its meeting in Vienna this week, by a delegate that, according to Reuters, sources represented a non-Gulf Arab member. And it doesn’t just seem to sum up the cartel’s frustrations on its inability to affect oil prices. It very well might be true. . . .

When we’re talking about OPEC, the only member that really matters is Saudi Arabia. Of the 32.25 million barrels of oil per day (mbpd) that OPEC produced in April, the Saudis contributed 10.12 mbpd, more than double the next most productive member (Iraq). Riyadh is the only member capable of realistically reigning back its output enough to affect the market, and historically has seemed willing to do most of the heavy lifting for the cartel in times of low prices.

Times have changed, though, and the country’s new man-behind-the-throne—the 31 year old deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman—has little interest in ceding Saudi market share in pursuit of higher prices while the rest of OPEC gets a free ride. This shift in thinking has been motivated in no small part by burgeoning non-OPEC supplies, upstart American shale production chief among them, which have threatened to dilute the effect of an OPEC production cut (as oil prices creep up, so too will U.S. output as more shale plays once again become profitable).

The global oil market is no longer dominated by a psychology of scarcity, but rather one of abundance.

The frackers may just save Western Civiization. God knows our political leaders aren’t up to the job.