NEW YORK: The technological breakthrough pioneered by George P. Mitchell, the billionaire Texas oilman and philanthropist who died Friday at age 94, reversed the fortunes of the US energy industry and reshaped the global energy landscape.
As Mitchell was pursuing the natural gas he and others knew was trapped in thin layers of sedimentary rock under several US states, it appeared to most that the world was running out of oil and gas and what was left was found mostly in the Middle East.
US natural gas production had peaked in 1972 and prices were rising to alarming new levels in the middle of the 2000s, raising heating and electricity bills and sending US manufacturers of plastics, fertilizer and countless other natural gas-dependent goods overseas.
US oil production, meanwhile, had peaked in 1970, and fell every year but one between 1985 and 2008.
But after 20 years of trying, Mitchell finally learned how to combine horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing, a process together now known generally as fracking, to release natural gas at a rate fast enough to turn a profit.
By the mid-2000s, the practice had spread across the industry and the country, and natural gas production in the US began to soar.
In 2005, the US produced about the same amount of gas it had produced in 1968. Last year, the US produced a record amount and more gas than any other nation. And all this while drillers held back: They would have produced more if prices hadn't fallen to 20-year lows.
This cheap gas lowered energy bills for consumers and inspired plans for new chemical plants, steel plants and fertilizer plants around the nation from manufacturers looking to capitalize on some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world. Electric utilities drastically increased the use of natural gas to generate power and cut back on the use of coal, helping the US power industry substantially reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide.
The US now has the potential to produce so much gas that companies are looking to export it to Europe and Asia, just five years after regulators were approving plans to import natural gas in hopes of avoiding an energy crisis.
As natural gas drillers were perfecting fracking, oil engineers learned to adapt the process to squeeze crude out of oil-bearing rock. By 2008, they had learned to tap oil deposits in formations in North Dakota and Texas, and US oil production started to creep up. It soon boomed.
Last year US crude production rose to 6.5 million barrels per day, and production is on track to rise to 7.3 million barrels per day this year. That's an increase of 46 percent since 2008. The increase of 2.3 million barrels per day is about as much oil as Venezuela produces.
The International Energy Agency says the US is on track to be the world's biggest crude producer by the end of the decade.