The breakthrough on hydraulic fracturing came in the late 1990s. “If we couldn’t, then he would hire other people who could.” The head of his development team told me that Mitchell “wanted us to figure a way” to get the gas out of a formation called the Barnett Shale. In the face of great skepticism, Mitchell refused to accept no as an answer. It took a decade and a half of conviction, investment, and dogged determination. Until then, people didn’t talk about “shale gas” if it had any name, it was “uneconomic gas.” The breakthrough did not come easily. In the early 1980s, Mitchell read a scholarly article saying that it might be possible to extract commercial gas from shale rock. In Chapter 16 of “The Quest,” I describe how this all came about. In so doing, he changed America’s energy position, making it possible to actually talk about United States “energy independence.” As such, he has changed the world energy outlook in the twenty-first century and set in motion the global rebalancing of oil and gas that is now occurring.
#Michael bloomberg on fracked gas code#
For Mitchell, who passed away at age 94, broke the code on shale gas and launched the unconventional revolution in oil and gas. But before Mitchell was done, he launched what has proved to be the most important innovation in energy so far this century. He started out after World War II with nothing except his brains and determination and a one-room office atop a Houston drugstore. George Mitchell was the son of a Greek goat herder.
#Michael bloomberg on fracked gas full#
Whatever your view of the risks and rewards offered by this method of liberating fuels from “tight” rock ( the full range can be heard here), Mitchell’s life is one worth studying - including his stated concerns about the need for strict regulation of this process.
Loren Steffy has posted a fascinating deeper dive on Mitchell at Forbes that I also recommend. Read below for Yergin’s “ Your Dot” contribution, which includes a link to an excerpt on Mitchell and fracking from his superb book, “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.”īut first click over to the fine obituary by my colleague Doug Martin and explore a timeline of Mitchell’s accomplishments posted by his family foundation. Mitchell, the 94-year-old Texas oil man widely credited with playing a pivotal role in unlocking the shale energy era, I reached out for a reaction from Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer-winning chronicler of humanity’s fossil fuel era. On a hunch, George Mitchell began drilling shale rock formations in the Texas dirt fields where he had long pumped oil and gas.Īs news spread over the weekend of the death of George P. Revkin | The New York Times | July 29, 2013
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