Free Republic

By 2007, a century of drilling had drained the biggest U.S. sandstone reservoirs and sent oil and gas producers overseas to virgin lands. Then a new combination of drilling techniques came into play, sparking a rush to amass as much once-abandoned American land as possible. Merging hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, wildcatters blasted through tight rock formations that had fed the country’s sandstone with crude oil and natural gas for millions of years. For the U.S. oil and gas industry, it meant wiping the map clean of its aging framework for producing from softer sandstone, and starting over. “The amount...