Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Mar 14, 2016 (I)

choi

(1) Asjylyn Loder, Gone with the Boom. Oklahoma was swept up in the shale revolution. Bow it's facing a swift and brutal reckoning. (in the column "Opening Remark")
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... g-comes-to-oklahoma

Quote:

"Oklahoma City was once the beating heart of the shale revolution, [remaining the] home to pioneers  [of fracking companies] such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy, and Continental Resources whose founder and CEO has been Harold Hamm]. * * * and the companies that could claim credit for it were smack in the middle of the State That Oil Built.

"Devon Energy [founded in 1971 by John Nichols], the first company to perfect shale drilling * * * John Richels, then president and CEO of Devon Energy, told me that Saudi Arabia no longer had the capacity to flood the world market—and that it would take a worldwide economic collapse to trigger a lasting decline in the price of oil.

"Devon, Chesapeake, SandRidge Energy, and Continental Resources were spending almost $2 drilling for every $1 they earned selling oil and gas. * * * From 2011 to 2014, those four companies outspent cash flow by a combined $36.8 billion. This wasn't a problem as long as high oil prices made refinancing easy. Years of near-zero interest rates had sent investors hunting for returns in riskier corners of the market. Of the 97 exploration and production companies evaluated by Standard & Poor's in April 2014, 75 had ratings below investment grade. That didn't scare investors. * * * Shale wasn’t sustaining the frenzy; cheap debt was.

"In the second quarter of last year, Oklahoma's economy shrank 2.4 percent, the worst performance in the country.

"Oklahoma's fortunes have been tied to the oil industry for more than a century. * * * Politicians said they’d diversify the economy. But the present just echoes the past. In 1982 the oil industry paid 13 percent of worker earnings in Oklahoma, according to Wilkerson of the Kansas City Fed. At the end of 2014, it was 14 percent. * * * The state faces a $1.3 billion budget shortfall [when corporations and individuals earn less, they do not pay much income tax]. * * * For now, the low unemployment rates left over from the boom are helping to soften the blow.

Note: Google and one may find Louisiana and Texas are occasionally called "the State That Oil Built" (all upper case), though the title is principally reserved for Oklahoma. For a reason:

James O Kemm, Tulsa; Oil capital of the world. Arcadia Publishing, 2004 (in the series Images of America), at page 19
https://books.google.com/books?i ... uilt%22&f=false
("Oklahoma is often called 'The State That Oil Built,' the title of a booklet [14 pages] published by the American Petroleum Institute in the early 1940s [actually, 1947]. After the Red Fork discovery, leasing and drilling continued in an effort to find other oil fields")

* Red Fork, Oklahoma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fork,_Oklahoma
(famous for being the location of the first oil well in Tulsa County; On June 25, 1901)

This Wiki page suggests the origin of the community's name is unclear. The second most populous city of Oklahoma, Tulsa is the county seat of Tulsa County.