"The shale gas revolution has frankly been an unmitigated disaster for any buy-and-hold investor in the shale gas industry with very few limited exceptions," Steve Schlotterbeck, former chief executive of EQT, a shale gas giant, said at a petrochemicals conference in Pittsburgh. "In fact, I'm not aware of another case of a disruptive technological change that has done so much harm to the industry that created the change."

He did not pull any punches. "While hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits have accrued to hundreds of millions of people, the amount of shareholder value destruction registers in the hundreds of billions of dollars," he said. "The industry is self-destructive."