According to the IPAA (Independent Petroleum Association of America) fracking has created millions of American jobs, reduced energy prices, brought cleaner air by significantly reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 25-year-lows, strengthened our national security, and transformed the United States into a global energy superpower.

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Hydraulic Fracking is a drilling technology used for extracting oil, natural gas, geothermal energy, or water from deep underground. To date, the process has produced more than seven billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

 

At the same time, fracking has its detractors concerned about its safety, effects on drinking water, its potential to cause earthquakes, and its destruction of the landscape.

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The breakthroughs that revolutionized the natural gas industry — massive hydraulic fracturing, new mapping tools and horizontal drilling — were made possible in large part by the Federal Government’s technology, financial support, and favorable tax credits.

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Slick-water fracking is a technology first demonstrated by the Energy Department in 1977.  George Mitchell, a now legendary Texas oilman, used the technology to crack the shale gas code. He learned of shale’s potential from the Eastern Gas Shales Project, a partnership begun in 1976 between the Federal Department of Energy’s (DOE) Morgantown Energy Research Center and dozens of companies and universities. Over the years, DOE invested $129 million developing the technology. Starting in 1981, Mitchell’s geologists drew heavily on that research to plan their explorations.

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Mitchell’s success depended on a revolution in monitoring and mapping technologies driven largely by government laboratories. The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Labs provided Mitchell with many critical microseismic tools. Mitchell also benefited from 3-D imaging, which the Energy Department had long supported.

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The third critical technology was horizontal drilling and well installation, a breakthrough that captured much more shale gas than conventional vertical wells allowed. The government had supported innovative drilling methods since the ’70s; in 1976, two government engineers, Joseph Pasini III and William K. Overby Jr., patented an early-stage directional drilling technology that became the precursor to horizontal drilling. In 1991, the publicly funded Gas Research Institute recommended that Mitchell experiment with horizontal drilling and even subsidized his first

horizontal well.

 

Ultimately, Mitchell and other gas developers’ decided to spend millions of dollars and nearly two decades pioneering techniques that few thought would result in commercially viable extraction. The federal government generously subsidized drilling for non-conventional gas, including shale gas, throughout the 1980s and 1990s when oil and gas were cheap and there was no demand. This allowed Mitchell’s experiments to continue in the early years.

 

Today there are concerns about the environmental consequences of fracking. Yet, there is no denying the extraordinary economic return on taxpayer investments. Shale gas allowed the United States to go from being a net gas importer to a net gas exporter.

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Since World War II, every significant energy technology - nuclear power, natural gas turbines, solar panels, and wind turbines - pretty much every alternative energy program has the government’s technology and support behind it helping to move new industries forward to commercial viability. The government realizes that the private sector alone cannot sustain the long-term investments necessary for big technological breakthroughs in the midst of volatile

energy markets and short-term pressure to produce profits.

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The result of 40 years research and work by the government and industry in fracking technology allows the USA independence in gas supplies and brings important economic benefits and security to the nation. These benefits were possible only with the support of government, its technologies, and the tenaciousness of George Mitchell.

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Sources: IPAA (Independent Petroleum Association of America) website, Hydraulic Fracturing. https://www.ipaa.org/fracking/#

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Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, A boom in shale gas? Credit the feds, The

Washington Post. December 16, 2011

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Contributor, the Politics of Fracking, Forbes, Feb. 19, 2014, V31,