In a bind

THIS year’s Christmas parade in Lindsay, in the heart of Oklahoma’s oil country, featured the Stars and Stripes every ten yards, 11 horses with riders in Santa hats and a rifle salute by veterans. But the highlight was a thundering, bright red oil tanker covered in fairy lights and owned by Hamm & Phillips, an oil-services firm with local roots that has ridden the shale boom in the state and across America.

That energy revolution is the envy of the business world. Abundant oil and gas have been extracted from underground rocks by blasting them with a mixture of water, chemicals and sand—“fracking”, in the jargon. As well as festive spirit, the firms responsible embody an all-American formula of maverick engineers, bold entrepreneurs and risk-hungry capital markets that no country can match.