That upward trend towards the end of Obama's term occurred in spite of Obama. Fracking gets the credit.
More accurately, the exploitation of unconventional resources by drilling horizontal wells and fraccing them. We'd been drilling horizontal wells in the Williston Basin and elsewhere since the mid '80s. THere was a boom in the Red River in Bowman COunty before the Bakken boom, and other rock formations had been similarly tapped, not just in the Williston Basin, but elsewhere as well (The Austin Chalk comes to mind, for one). What made it happen, though was the discovery that these techniques could be applied in the Bakken Formation and elsewhere, and the eventual boom that resulted, mainly because the mineral rights and land ownership was primarily private (The government couldn't refuse to lease the exploration rights, nor pull the rug out from most of them.) The Utica, Marcellus, Haynesville, and other shale plays factored in, too, especially in lowering the cost of natural gas. Still, the Obama Administration stalled the transport of some 600,000 barrels of oil per day by refusing to grant the permits to allow pipeline construction to proceed, both with the keystone XL and the DAPL, costing mineral owners, oil companies, and Americans millions of dollars in the process. Figure every day the DAPL wasn't completed cost $2.5 million to oil companies, mineral owners, and taxing entities (Stare and Federal), and that does not include the 'discount' the oil sold at because it was hard to transport out of the region. Sure, Warren Buffett and the BNSF made a fortune, transporting oil by rail, but everyone could have made much, much more.
In the meantime, when the Obama EPA drilled two wells in Wyoming,so poorly constructed that they penetrated oil producing zones and the USGS would not even test one (that badly done), in order to 'prove' that hydraulic fracturing polluted surface waters (which was not the result of the test which was conducted, nor the result of pre and post frac water analysis in the Appalachians, the government got so peeved that it gave over a million acres of Wyoming away to the local Indian Tribe, still subject to a suit brought by the State because the boundaries of a State must be changed by Congress, not decree.
Yep, much was accomplished in spite of Obama and his minions, but hydraulic fracturing was only part of it all.
