US oil industry forsees more mergers, more bankruptcies.

The US oil industry shook up the world energy order in the last decade, and now it has been going through a shakeout of its own that is expected to end in more bankruptcies and mergers.

In the early part of this century, an upstart band of US energy producers brought hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," technology to the world. It was an American-born innovation that helped turn the US from the world's biggest importer of oil into, just recently, a net exporter of oil and fuel products.

In the last decade, US oil production...