We often point to the start of the shale revolution around 2008. But really, shale development didn’t begin a decade ago. It didn’t begin in 1947, either, the year that the Stanolind Oil Corporation experimented with its first “Hydrafrac” well by injecting 1,000 gallons of napalm-thickened gasoline and a gel “breaker” to extract trapped gas from a Kansas limestone formation.
Heck, shale development didn’t even start in the 1860s, when liquid nitrogen was blasted into shallow, hard rock to coax more oil out of wells dug in West Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania.
