By Noah Rothman:
In 1998, a petroleum engineer named Nick Steinsberger pumped a slurry of sand, water, and chemicals under high pressure into a shale formation beneath a rural town just north of Fort Worth, Texas. It shattered the rock and released the natural gas trapped inside. A decade later, the petroleum industry discovered how to apply Steinsberger’s approach with directional drilling to free not just natural gas but the hydrocarbons that make up crude oil from subterranean rock formations.
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