It hasn’t kept up with inflation and the price of hard metal commodities so it’s more like the price keeps going down:
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
https://www.macrotrends.net/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historica...
Given the sharp rise in production since 2010, it seems the flat price has more to do with increasing supply and less to do with waning demand:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country
The rule of thumb is that for every penny of gas price at the pump, averaged over the year, it takes $1 billion of consumer spending.
So if the gas prices drop by say 20 cents per gallon vs last year, that’s $20 billion more dollars in consumer pockets that can be spent elsewhere.
It amuses me how OPEC is the world largest cartel... And they go with it
There are a lot of things such as situation _could_ do.
The whole point of shale is that you can get it going again quickly and piecemeal based on the price of oil. It puts a large plateau/floor on oil at $~60 per barrel which is geopolitically very useful.