| Your statement is flatly incorrect. That's precisely the claim bduerst made. He set up the strawman: "It took only 20 years for fracking to go from an experiment to full scale commercial roll out." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12287615 And yes, I knocked it down. The New York Times first mentions fracturing as a "new method" in gas extraction in October of 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/business/energy-environmen... There are a couple of possible interpretations. One is that it took sixty, rather than twenty years, for fracking to move out of the experimental phase. The other is that 32 job on 23 wells in 7 fields, in 1949, constituted production-scale operations. You haven't asked, but I'll volunteer: what changed to make hydrofracturing commercially attractive were the combination of a global oil shortage, and a massive price spike, in 2007-2008. The fracking boom started shortly afterward. It's now in tremendous trouble on account of those same price dynamics, given its high costs of operation. You've got fracking operators with significant debts they need to service, with their only recourse to continue flooding oil and gas into markets which don't want the product. New rig counts are down and have been down for the past few years -- you're not seeing new drilling, and the former boom towns of South Dakota and West Texas are going bust. Bakken Shale hydrocarbon was being explored by 1909. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=bakken+shale&hl=en&as_s... Schmoker, J. W. "Use of formation-density logs to determine organic-carbon content in Devonian shales of the western Appalachian Basin and an additional example based on the Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin." Petroleum geology of the Devonian and Mississippian black shale of eastern North America: US Geological Survey Bulletin (1909): J1-J14. It wasn't an area of active exploration, nor was off-shore deep-sea drilling, again, until the price of conventional oil drove new prospecting offshore. The first 40-50 years of offshore development were decidely shallow-water. Gulf Coast rigs were often only in knee-deep, or at best a few fathoms, of water. Not in thousand-foot depths. But yes, as of 1900, the prospect of deep-water offshore drilling had in fact been contemplated: Horton, Edward E. "STATUS OF DEEP WATER PRODUCTION SYSTEMS." (1900). Britain certainly would have appreciated knowing she had abundant oil nearby in 1912 when Churchill committed to converting the Navy from coal (abundant domestically) to oil (not). But that didn't turn up until after the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks. It's also since largely played out. |