To: Real Man who wrote (25238 ) 12/5/2009 9:29:13 AM From: Tommaso 1 Recommendation Read Replies (5) | Respond to of 71456 Vi, I am dropping off your thread. Some years ago I held a wide assortment of small natural gas producers and studied their quarterly reports carefully. At that time, I was making a great deal of money because of high natural gas prices, but I saw that these producers, in aggregate, were doubling production, and I could see that prices would come down. I kept pointing this out and it made some people very angry. Now, I have been posting the developments that are a result of George Mitchell's experiments at fracturing tight shales, which he and his engineers invented about six years ago for Mitchell Oil company and used in the Barnett Shale. Devon acquired the Mitchell Oil company. The fracturing technology has now spread to much larger formations and production has greatly increased. This is not a "theory" of mine. I have been trying to draw attention to facts. I seem to have failed, and am now abandoning the attempt and vacating your thread. Correction: It started earlier than I thought:An energy answer in the shale below? Washington Post. “”It’s what’s really going to turn this whole place around,” said her son Daniel Fitzsimmons, who has since helped form the Binghamton Conklin Gas Lease Coalition. … As a result, said BP chief executive Tony Hayward, “the picture has changed dramatically.” “The United States is sitting on over 100 years of gas supply at the current rates of consumption,” he said. Because natural gas emits half the greenhouse gases of coal, he added, that “provides the United States with a unique opportunity to address concerns about energy security and climate change.” … Credit for discovering that gas could be economically extracted from shale generally goes to George Mitchell, former head of Mitchell Energy. In the early 1980s, as the company’s production was declining, Mitchell and his geologists started experimenting with “hydraulic fracturing” — blasting underground layers of shale with a mixture of water, chemicals and sand to crack the rock and get gas flowing out of it.” See other thousands of references at:google.com