To: KyrosL who wrote (82029 ) 10/27/2011 7:13:04 PM From: Snowshoe Read Replies (3) | Respond to TJ sees the riots in Greece and blindly expects bloody revolution in the USA. But you bring a Greek over here and he starts a different kind of revolution... :o)The Energy Revolution That Keeps Carbon on Top: Nathan Myhrvold bloomberg.com In the meantime, however, a real revolution has happened in traditional energy -- one that poses a serious challenge to companies and investors betting on alternative energy. This breakthrough is arguably one of the greatest advances in energy production since the 1960s. And it came not from a Silicon Valley company, or from MIT or Stanford, but from the son of a Greek goatherd who immigrated to the U.S. George Mitchell was born in Galveston, Texas , went to Texas A&M University and, in 1946, founded an oil-drilling and real- estate business. The company did well, and in the 1980s, Mitchell decided to take on a major technical challenge: He would try to coax gas out of a portion of the Barnett shale , which lies deep under Fort Worth and 15 counties in north- central Texas. People told Mitchell he was wasting his money; you can’t squeeze blood from a stone, and you can’t squeeze oil or gas out of shale, which is essentially fossilized mud. Huge amounts of natural gas have formed in layers of shale, but it’s trapped within the rock and doesn’t flow toward a borehole. The same is true of vast gas deposits that are stuck in coal beds too deep to mine, and gas that saturates spongelike sandstones and other semiporous rocks. Pulling out this “tight gas,” as drillers call it, is like trying to suck a thick milkshake through a thin cocktail straw or to breathe through a pillow. But Mitchell was stubborn. He and his roughnecks doggedly tinkered with a variety of long-known techniques that had never been used in combination. One of these was horizontal drilling...
