Leigh Price should be in there, too. He was the USGS geochemist who recognized that the oil generated in the Bakken had stayed in the formation, and was providing estimates of billions of barrels in place as early as 1993. His work was one of the foundations of the Bakken boom.
In the 1970s Jimmy Carter touted shale as a possible energy source to get out from OPEC. Plus many other things like tides, wind, geothermal, ‘nucular’, coal gasification. Sigh.
Shale was the only approach that scaled economically, 40 years later.
My contention is that the collapse in the economy in 2008 would not have happened as violently, if at all, if energy prices remained stable or went down. The 2008 shock of $4.00 gas with no end in sight of future increases caused a hunker down effect that collapsed the financial system. And allowed Obama’s election.