Thankfully-or possibly regretfully-this is familiar territory for us. In many ways Texas is the epicenter of the worldwide energy revolution. With stubbornness, persistence, and a capable team, he achieved success after decades of attempts that would have made other experimenters give up, and so now we’re off to the races. It was just technologically and financially prohibitive to extract them.īut then a Texas oil and gas producer, George Mitchell, cracked the code for making shale a worthwhile endeavor. The idea that shale would contain oil and gas is not new either, as geologists have known for a long time that these formations-the source for major oil and gas reservoirs-hold a lot of the desired materials. But even those techniques had been used independently for decades.
The great enabler for the modern version of shale production was the combination of hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, and sophisticated fluids that include a variety of chemicals. Fracking in one form or another has been deployed since the 1860s with a variety of approaches, including dynamite and even nuclear detonations. One of the first lessons Gold reveals is that the new techniques of fracking are not new at all. Russell Gold, the senior energy reporter for the Wall Street Journal, just released a definitive account of the history of fracking with his book The Boom: How Fracking Ignited The American Energy Revolution and Changed the World.
In fact, it’s so new that its history is still being written. The shale revolution was Texas-led and Texas-bred.
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