Oil and gas were discovered in Michigan primarily due to drilling for water. Basically the gas was there all along. In the 1980s they had a gas blowout up north while they were driving pilings for a highway bridge.
Preferably salt water, even.
When I lived there in the sixties, I was surprised to discover that all the "oil derricks" were, in fact, brine wells.
Dow Chemical needed brine for its electrolysis plant that produced chlorine and caustic soda -- the building blocks of most inorganic chemicals.
Their other major plant at the time was in Freeport, TX. It used seawater as a raw material.