Slowing shale-drilling activity is the latest damper on U.S. manufacturers that had come to rely on a booming domestic energy market. Advances in fracking and drilling transformed global energy markets over the past decade, raising U.S. oil-and-gas production to record levels. That has created big business for American factories supplying drillers with cranes, engines and pipes. The oil-and-gas industry bought $48 billion worth of manufactured products in 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said, four times as much as was purchased in 2009.
