The Democrats are fracking insane

Spectator USA ^ | February 21, 2020 | James Delingpole

[Hojczyk]

Proposing a ban is election suicide. The Democrats are doing it anyway.

What could be more emblematic of the American Dream than fracking, the miracle technology that has created thousands of real jobs, lowered the cost of living, generated wealth and prosperity, boosted competitiveness and helped make the United States not just energy independent, but a net exporter of natural gas and petroleum products for the first time in decades? And what could be more characteristic of the elitist, small-minded, anti-market, anti-blue-collar, anti-growth, green-obsessed liberal-left than that the Democratic party is hell-bent on banning it?

Modern fracking — horizontal hydraulic fracturing — combines two technologies in a way that only a few decades ago would have sounded more like witchcraft or alchemy than a viable business proposition. It was devised in the late Nineties by Texas entrepreneur George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants (his father had been a goatherd), who set out to solve a seemingly impossible problem: how to make the richly abundant but apparently inaccessible pockets of gas trapped in America’s shale formations economically viable.

After spending $6 million on research and development, Mitchell found the solution. He combined the existing process of fracking (invented in the 1940s) — forcing liquid at high pressure into the shale so as to break up the rock and release the gas — with horizontal drilling. Everyone told him he was wasting his time and money but Mitchell was vindicated. As the Economist wrote in 2012, the year before his death, ‘Few business people have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell.

[DeFault User]

Slant hole drilling is not new either. A certain Mr. McBride, the father of a girl I knew in public school in East Texas, went to prison for drillin’ oil that wasn’t his’n.

Seems there wasn’t any black gold under his land so he drilled a slanted hole to his neighbor’s lease and stole the neighbor’s oil. I don’t recall how they caught him but his sin was tantamount to horse stealing in Texas, at least in the 1950s.