From the New York Times:
George P. Mitchell, the son of a Greek goatherd who capped a career as one of the most prominent independent oilmen in the United States by unlocking immense natural gas and petroleum resources trapped in shale rock formations, died on Friday in Galveston, Tex. He was 94.
On a hunch, Mr. Mitchell began drilling shale rock formations in the Texas dirt fields where he had long pumped oil and gas.
Mr. Mitchell’s role in championing new drilling and production techniques like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is credited with creating an unexpected natural gas boom in the United States. In a letter to President Obama last year, Daniel Yergin, the energy scholar and author, proposed that Mr. Mitchell be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“It is because of him that we can talk seriously about ‘energy independence,’ ” he said. (Mr. Mitchell did not receive the award.)
Mr. Mitchell combined academic training as a petroleum engineer and geologist with a gambler’s cunning to become an influential businessman worth $2 billion. He was a petroleum industry spokesman, then a persistent voice for “sustainable,” or environmentally responsible, economic growth. On 27,000 piney acres north of Houston, he built a town called The Woodlands partly to demonstrate his ideas.
The most significant chapter in his life came last. In the 1980s and ’90s, when many energy analysts foresaw only irreversible declines in hydrocarbon supplies, Mr. Mitchell got busy poking holes in Texas dirt on the hunch that they were wrong. Marshaling mostly existing technologies, he began fracturing shale rock formations in fields where he had long pumped oil and gas at shallower depths.
After 17 years of trying, Mr. Mitchell finally hit pay dirt with gushers of gas in 1998. The flow was so prodigious that a competitor thought that the announcement was a practical joke. The $6 million that Mr. Mitchell had put into the project was “surely the best development money in the history of gas,” The Economist magazine said.
The success enabled him to sell his company, the Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation, to the Devon Energy Corporation for $3.5 billion in 2001.
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Charges follow arrests at Balcombe test drill site
http://www.sussex.police.uk/whats-happening/latest/news-stories/2013/07/27/twelve-people-charged-after-protest-at-cuadrilla-site-in-balcombe/
(Mr. Mitchell did not receive the award.)
Why would he. He is smart, prosperous and a fossil fuel supporter. Everything tha OBlarny hates. Such a sad turn of events in the great USA. Destroyed by a kenyan dictator.
We have the opportunity to stop war in the middle east. By drilling elsewhere.. Let them eat sand…
Well, Mr Mitchell was not the father of hydraulic fracturing. Only methods to hydraulic feature shale hydrocarbon reservoirs. Shales typically have less than 200 nanodarcy permeability to gas flow – inches per year. The process to produce nanodarcy was thr I ugh extended horizontal drilling c opp mbined with staged frac treatments along the horizontal to increase reservoir surface area connected to the wellbore. For this Mr Mitchells persistence to find a way to produce nanodarcy permeability reservoirs should be commended. The journalist really lacks the history of hydraulic fracturing technolgy .
I just wish I could afford to take on such a bet!
His $3.5 bn sale to Devon occurred when he was 94-(2013-2001=12)=82 yrs. old. It’s never too late to become a self-made billionaire!