Drilling Advances Seen Erasing the 'E' From E&P in Lower-48 Gas Plays

摘要

The last seven years have been quite a ride as the US energy industry moved haltingly from a bleak certainty that hydrocarbon scarcity would be a future fact of life to an outlook for such abundance it has upended fundamental assumptions about supply-and-demand dynamics, Mitchell Energy & Development began experimental drilling in the Barnett Shale in Texas in the 1980s, years before production began to balloon in the 1990s, but it still wasn't obvious what George P. Mitchell had wrought. His firm didn't "discover" the Barnett Shale, just as its successors didn't discover the Haynesville, Fayetteville, Marcellus, Utica, or a host of other shales long known to geologists. Mitchell's legacy is the technology that would release the bounty within the rock, once thought forever sealed.