“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 24

drilling had been around since 1929 but didn't really take of until the
1980s, when the French i rm Elf Aquitaine demonstrated its commer-
cial promise in southwest France and of the Mediterranean shores of
Italy. 6 h e second technology, hydraulic fracturing, was introduced into
commercial practice by Stanolind Oil and Gas in 1947 at the Hugoton
i eld in Grant County, Kansas. 7 Similar techniques were used in the
early days of oil—back in the 1860s, drillers used liquid nitroglycerin
to coax oil out of rock from New York to Kentucky—but that approach
was dangerous and never became particularly widespread. By 1949,
Stanolind had a patent (and Halliburton secured an exclusive license)
on the new process that shot water, chemicals, and other materials deep
underground to break apart rock and help oil and gas l ow. 8
Geologists had long known that there was a massive amount of natural
gas trapped in shale rock formations. It took a stroke of innovative genius,
though, to tap into it. In the 1980s, George Mitchell, a Texas entrepreneur,
began to experiment with combinations of horizontal drilling to span the
deep shale with hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas within it; by
the late 1990s, his engineers had made the essential commercial break-
throughs. Yet as recently as 2009, you couldn't even i nd the words “shale
gas” in the annual U.S. government energy outlook. 9 By 2012, the docu-
ment was reporting that nearly a quarter of U.S. natural gas production had
come from shale in 2010, a number it projected would jump to half of U.S.
production by 2035. 10 Prices would rise moderately over that period—
government forecasters i gured i ve or six dollars for a thousand cubic feet
of natural gas by 2020 seemed reasonable, and most Wall Street analysts
pret y much agreed—but natural gas appeared destined to be abundant
and relatively cheap.
h e sudden change set of debates across the country. “What's hap-
pening with unconventional natural gas,” said John Deutch in 2011,
“is the biggest energy story that's happened in the 40-plus years that
I've been watching energy development in this country. ” 11 h at was a
big statement from someone who had watched from some pret y high
places, including as deputy defense secretary, undersecretary of energy,
and head of the CIA. Many pundits soon began speaking of natural gas
as the country's economic savior and about geopolitical consequences
that would reverberate throughout the world.