Thanks to the shale boom and fracking, U.S. oil producers are making life increasingly difficult for OPEC and that organization’s largest producer – Saudi Arabia, as Shoebat.com has reported. The rise in U.S. production is forcing OPEC nations to cut back on production rather than sell below breakeven.

According to Bloomberg:

Then there’s Saudi Arabia, which is still at the wheel of OPEC as its top producer. The Saudis still enjoy some of the lowest production costs in the world, so they can sustain a much lower price and still not worry about financing themselves. That’s a luxury many OPEC members don’t have. Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and even Russia all need oil prices higher than $100 a barrel to keep their deficits in check.

Right now the Saudis are a lot less worried about the budget deficits of their fellow oil exporters as they are about what’s happening in North Dakota and Texas. The biggest threat to the power the Saudis have wielded as the de-facto head of OPEC for the past 30 years isn’t cheap oil; it’s the 9 million barrels a day coming out of the U.S. The Saudis would much rather play a game of chicken with U.S. producers than bow to the wishes of Iran, which they’re in no hurry to accommodate given their disagreements over the Assad regime in Syria, not to mention Iran’s burgeoning alliance with Iraq.

For decades Saudi Arabia has been the preferred partner of the U.S. in the Middle East. At the heart of that partnership was America’s clear dependence on Saudi Arabia for its oil. But that dependence has diminished significantly over the past few years as U.S. refiners have substituted oil from the shale boom for imported oil.

The Saudis are perfectly willing to watch the price of oil keep falling to see if they can’t drive some of those U.S. companies out of business. So the game becomes how low can they go. Recent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance finds that 19 regions across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, and Arkansas stop being profitable at $75 a barrel. Which is roughly where things are at the moment.

But those regions account for only about 400,000 barrels of daily production. The real test will be if prices dip below $70. That could start eating into the profits of Bakken production and the hottest parts of Texas in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford shale regions, which account for more than half of all U.S. production.

If the Saudis want to start driving American oil producers out of business, perhaps Americans should be given the option of buying oil and gasoline products from American sources; most would pay a little extra.

Meanwhile, there are still left-wing Hollywood hypocrites and traitors who have already demonstrated a willingness to betray their nation to help the Saudis: