Federal money helped fuel gas boom

PITTSBURGH -- It sounds like a free-market success story: a natural gas boom created by drilling company innovation, delivering a vast new source of cheap energy without the government subsidies that solar and wind power demand.

But those who helped pioneer the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, recall a different path.

Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks.

Now, those industry pioneers say their own effort shows that the government should back research into future sources of energy -- for decades, if need be -- to promote breakthroughs.

Shale is a rock formation thousands of feet underground. With fracking, large volumes of water, along with sand and hazardous chemicals, are injected underground to break rock apart and free the gas within it.

In 1975, the Department of Energy began funding research into fracking and horizontal drilling, in which wells go down, then sideways for thousands of feet. But it took more than 20 years to perfect the process.

"There's not a lot of companies that would stay with something this long. Most companies would have given up," said Dan Steward, a geologist who began working with the Texas natural gas firm Mitchell Energy in 1981. Steward credited founder George Mitchell as a visionary who also got support from the government at key points.

One step at a time, the problems of shale drilling were solved. Crawley said Energy Department researchers processed drilling data on supercomputers at a federal lab. Later, technology created to track sounds of Russian submarines during the Cold War was repurposed to help the industry use sound to get a 3-D picture of shale deposits and track exactly where a drill bit was, thousands of feet underground.

"The government has to be involved, to some degree, with new technologies," Steward said.