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For years, the oil industry and its powerful friends in Congress talked of a shale gas utopia where fracking would lead to energy independence in for US.

There has been a huge amount written over the last few days about the plummeting oil price. One British newspaper is warning of an “oil war” as the price of Brent crude “tanks” on the back of oversupply in the market.

The oil industry’s public relations arm, the American Petroleum Institute (API), has reached new lows in its attempts to twist the on-going debate about the safety of crude-by-rail trains in the US.

The American authorities have “slashed” the amount of recoverable oil from the vast California Monterey shale deposits by a whopping 96 per cent.

The mayor of Albany, the capital city of New York State, has become the latest elected official of a major American city to demand that the Federal government increase the regulatory oversight of crude by rail trains.

And on it goes. One accident after another. But this time a major disaster was averted by a whisker. On Monday a freight train, which was carrying fracked and highly flammable shale oil from North Dakota, derailed on a bridge over the Schuylkill river in South Philadelphia.

In California, the industry's use of toxic acids is set to rocket, but the practice is unregulated.