The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused significant disruption in the global oil industry. However, in this video clip from "The High Energy Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 15, Fool contributors Matt DiLallo, Jason Hall, and Travis Hoium discuss how other factors also contributed to the current trouble in the energy markets.

Matt DiLallo: So, I think we have to pull back a little bit and look at what has brought us to the play. There's so much talk that this is all Russia's fault, blaming Putin for bringing the oil crisis. But this really dates back to 2014 when Saudi Arabia and Russia engaged in a price war to knock out U.S. production because U.S. production was growing so fast and that was eating into OPEC's market share.

They teamed up, and they really put the pressure on U.S. oil producers. We saw a huge pullback in spending, and that also translated not only the shale but offshore. We've seen a big pullback in offshore spending. There's just huge different dynamics between the two. You can bring a shale well on in six months. Offshore, it can be years, depending on how long it is.

Jason Hall: It can be decades.

DiLallo: Yeah. It really pushed the oil industry back a few years, and then it started to get back on its feet, oil prices started to rise, and then COVID hit. But right before COVID hit, we had another price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. I think it was February 2020, and that's why oil prices went as low as they did. They just flooded the market with oil to hurt U.S. producers again.

So, this has really changed the mindset of U.S. producers. They're no longer in that whole, drill baby drill focus. Investors have put pressure on them, banks have put pressure on them, ESG pressures. There's so much pressure facing the oil industry. They've really changed from investing every dollar, and then some it's drilling new wells into let's just trying to make as much money as we can and then reward investors with that.

So, there's just this huge run-up of how the industry has changed, and then, it didn't take much. We had such a tight oil market coming out of COVID. It didn't take much for it to hit the tipping point. Jason and I talked last December on a podcast. My prediction for 2022 was oil could reach $100 a barrel. It's because there's so many ways to get there.

We could have had a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia or wildfires in Canada, anything like that could have tipped us over, so it was just waiting to happen, and that's how we got there. The Russian conflict is what brought us there. It just has huge ramifications because of how much oil Russia produces, and I know you've got some slides on that. I will turn it back over to you to talk about that.

Travis Hoium: Yes. I just want to put some of what you're saying into context with this price chart here. This is the price of Brent Crude Oil. This is 2014, right here. This peak, this is when U.S. oil production in specifically from shale and offshore drilling really started to pick up and then just crashed, and that was the first, oh my gosh, maybe this isn't the market that we thought it was when it was drill baby drill days.

Hall: I want to add one thing to that, that the run-up before that, just for people that weren't really following the energy market that closely, is most of the 10 years heading into that period, the common knowledge, the general consensus was something called peak oil. That, we had gotten to a point where all the easily accessible oil in North America had been produced.

Now, all the oil that's in shale, geologists have known about that since the 1940s. They've known that oil was there, but it was just inaccessible. The whole thing, that multiyear period of oil above $100 a barrel, was really before hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. It was still generally untenable coming into that period. That was the reason oil stayed above that for such a protracted period of time.

Hoium: Yeah, that's right. Then is the shale boom, really this decade, and then you see this is the COVID crash. The reason that I pulled this chart up is, oil prices are actually really important for the economy. I at least want to flag that. We're going to focus mostly on oil, but if oil were to stay at $130 a barrel, there is a lot of unintended consequences for the economy, broadly, as people make different decisions.

If it costs $100 to fill your tank, you're going to make different buying decisions about what you're going to do with what you have left over in your discretionary income. I think, that's something that's really important to keep in mind. Now, oil has come back a little bit, so maybe that's a little less important today. But absolutely, if this Russia invasion of Ukraine continues, if oil prices spike because of Russia's supply, and this gets into Russia's supply and why Russia is important.

This is where oil exports from Russia go to Netherlands, Germany, Poland and then, generally, Europe is where a lot of their oil goes. Then China is actually the biggest buyer. The other is natural gas, and this is probably a more acute problem in Europe because they are so reliant on Russian natural gas. I think that's worth bringing into the equation here. Jason has talked about it multiple times.

Natural gas exports and liquefied natural gas could be a really big business for the U.S. in the future because places like, Europe and Japan have a lot of demand for natural gas to power their power plants. Still, I think another thing to bring into this equation is natural gas supply disruptions in Europe, specifically.