If you think fracking looms big on Pennsylvania’s economic future, you’re not alone. So does the most prominent investor from the world’s top oil-producing nation.

Suffice it to say the investor — billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, grandson of the founding king of Saudi Arabia — is unsettled by the new kid on the global energy block.

Fracking — short for hydraulic fracturing — is the high-pressure injection of water and chemicals into wells to crack oil- and gas-bearing rock formations deep underground. It’s being used to access natural gas deposits in the Marcellus shale formation deep under vast stretches of Pennsylvania, said to hold enough gas to power the entire United States for 30 years or longer.

The prince is warning his oil-reliant kingdom that fracking in Pennsylvania and elsewhere presents a serious threat to Saudi Arabia and other member nations of the OPEC petroleum cartel.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading exporter of crude oil with 2012 petroleum exports of $336 billion. But the prince, an astute observer, notes that OPEC’s exports to North America tumbled to a 15-year low in 2012, and the International Energy Agency expects the demand for OPEC crude will continue to slide in coming years.

Prince Alwaleed says the kingdom needs to start reducing its reliance on crude exports and diversifying its revenues now. Oil revenue covers 92 percent of the government’s budget, he says, and almost 90 percent of the country’s total revenue comes from crude exports.

“(W)e see that rising North American shale gas production is an inevitable threat,” he wrote in an open letter to oil minister Ali al Naimi and other Saudi government heads, according to a report posted Monday on the Financial Times International website.

Given the political climate across the Arab World and Middle East, destabilization of the Saudi economy could snowball into a regional disaster.

Al Naimi, the oil minister, doesn’t share Alwaleed’s gloom-and-doom perspective — at least not publicly; He and other OPEC officials downplay any threat an increase of North American oil and gas production might present to them. Earlier this year, al Naimi actually praised the rise of fracking in America as a stabilizing factor in global energy production.

They are foolish to dismiss Prince Alwaleed’s concerns. If his assessment is correct, then Saudi Arabia’s all-or-nothing oil policy is very risky. As the single source of Saudi Arabia’s income continues to diminish, it will become increasingly harder to divert any of that diminishing income for investment in alternative moneymakers. At the same time, a more energy-independent United States will be less motivated to shower its longstanding Saudi alliance with military hardware and other support.

That should give us something to think about as we continue hammering out details like impact fees and water quality monitoring.