WHAT - Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 17

ported public-private research. These efforts were spurred by the energy crisis of
1973, when the Arab members of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, imposed an oil embargo to punish the United States for its support of
Israel during the Yom Kippur War. 9 It was also spurred by the decline in conven-
tional natural gas production in the United States over the course of that decade. In
response to the crisis, the Ford and Carter administrations prioritized the search for
new energy supplies. Industry and federal researchers began to focus on techniques
to access “unconventional” resources, such as those listed above—coal bed meth-
ane, “tight sands” natural gas, and shale gas.
The National Labs—Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico, and Lawrence
Livermore in California—provided computer modeling, monitoring, and evalu-
ation to demonstration projects. In 1979, the public-private efforts to drive shale
gas and coal bed methane to market were formalized in the Department of Energy's
Commercialization Plan for Recovery of Natural Gas from Unconventional
Sources. New, three-dimensional microseismic imaging, originally developed by
the Sandia Lab for coal mines, was used to locate fractures in shale and “see” un-
evenly distributed gas formations deep underground. In the meantime, researchers
found that diamond-studded drill bits were far more effective at boring through
tough shale than conventional drill bits. 10
In 1980, a year after the second energy crisis in 1979 caused by the Iranian Re-
volution, Congress passed the Windfall Profits Tax Act, which created the Section
29 production tax credit for unconventional gas. By providing an incentive of $0.50
per thousand cubic feet of natural gas produced from unconventional resources, the
tax credit spurred the growth of shale hydrofracking. 11
Most of the early research and demonstration work was conducted in the Devo-
nian and Marcellus Shales, both of which are located on the East Coast. But the key
breakthrough happened in the Barnett Shale, in Texas, where a determined tinkerer
solved the vexing problem of how to coax gas to flow out of a hydrofracked well
smoothly and quickly.
Who Was the Determined Tinkerer?
George Phydias Mitchell was the son of a Greek goatherder (Savvas Paraskevo-
polous, who changed his name to placate an American employer) who became
a Galveston-based oil and gas producer. George Mitchell and his brother drilled
10,000 wells around Fort Worth, and became successful at working oil fields others