It promises to be a fracking good year in some of our oil producing regions. To understand why, you need to keep four numbers in mind: $100, $25, $50, and $60. The first is the approximate price of a barrel of crude oil in the summer of 2014, the second the price to which it plunged early in 2016, the third the current price after more than doubling last year, and the last the price U.S. frackers are expecting in 2017, now that the OPEC cartel and fellow-traveler Russia have agreed to rein in output.

Fracking technology boosted U.S. oil production to some 9 million barrels per day, right behind Russia’s 10 million and Saudi Arabia’s 11 million. So the Saudis opened their taps wide to drive prices down and American frackers out of business, in the process preventing the hated Iranians from marketing more oil.