The US Shale - Fracking Revolution: Hey, Not So Fast -- It Wasn't Just George Mitchell, DOE Was His Silent Partner

A big "thank you" to a reader for sending a link to an interesting New York Times story.

This may be a factual re-writing of history, but after DOE's debacle with solar research and funding (can you say "Solyndra"?), this story almost has the feel of a DOE press release crying, "Hey, we're not so bad. We've had some successes." From the article:

[With regard to fracking] the Department of Energy was there with research funding when no one else was interested.

It would be interesting to hear Harold Hamm's side of the story. 

The linked article tells us that it was actually the federal government geologists that deserve all the credit for fracking which led to an energy boom in this country. I find that a bit of a stretch.

Even the article's authors have to admit it really was George Mitchell that deserves most of the credit:

Mitchell Energy engineers encountered numerous obstacles to successful shale plays before partnering with federal agencies, which bore some of the costs for novel horizontal drilling techniques and hand-delivered crucial three-dimensional mapping technologies developed at Sandia National Laboratories. Even with this partnership, Mitchell Energy endured years of experimentation and dozens of failed test wells before producing shale gas for a profit.

And it continues:

Where George Mitchell proved invaluable was engaging the work of government researchers and piecing together different federally-developed technologies to develop a commercial product. Mitchell himself spent much of the 1980s lobbying for sustained federal fossil energy research at the Department of Energy, defending “Crawley’s folly” in front of a hostile Congress.  

Fighting the government, fighting Congress, makes George Mitchell's story even more incredible: not only did he have to take on geologists he had to take on government bureaucrats. Unlike the gazillions of dollars poured into the US solar industry without much question or oversight, it sounds like George Mitchell was a David against a Goliath. According to the linked essay, George Mitchell took most of the financial risk; the government appeared to provide a small amount of funding for a demonstration project. The "Solyndra" companies took on zero risk as far as I can tell; it was mostly (or, in some cases, all) government funding.

(And, of course, that same government is now trying to put the horse back in the barn, trying to shut down fracking if at all possible. By the way, that leads to another story line that I posted when when I first started blogging about the Bakken.)

This was the final line of the essay:

Disregarding the role of the public sector in the U.S. shale revolution erases Mitchell’s crucial strengths as a collaborator, scholar, and champion of public innovation efforts.

It does?

Whatever the factual re-write really entails, it does appear that the DOE mission statement has changed under the Obama administration. Prior to this administration it sounds like the DOE mission was to work with US citizens in developing new sources of energy; the current DOE mission statement appears to be more about crony capitalism and slow-rolling the US fossil fuel industry.

With regard to the Bakken: the Bakken never would have been developed as quickly as it did had it been under Federal jurisdiction. In fact, had it been under BLM control, the Bakken may not have come to pass. The state of North Dakota, its citizens, the legislature, the NDIC, all played a critical role in the Bakken boom. The Bakken boom in North Dakota where BLM was in charge was delayed about two years; it took a senator, Senator Byron Dorgan, to get things moving in Dunn County.