On federal lands, Shell has been researching methods to cook oil out of the shale (basically oil-soaked rock) without mining it or polluting groundwater.
Operated by Anadarko with 30%, that well was another monster, going down more than 31, 000 feet in 5, 800 feet of water, and discovering a remarkable 1, 000 feet of oil-bearing rock with very promising reservoir properties.
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Bissell found out that some rock oil was a by-product obtained by drilling for salt.
It's a guess based on how much is known, and likely new finds, and how much technology might improve over the next few decades at extracting oil from those hard-to-reach rock formations.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, pumps millions of gallons of water mixed with fine sand and chemicals deep into oil and gas wells to crack gas-bearing rock.
But this was Bissell's vision of the "new new thing"--get sufficient volumes of rock oil by drilling for it refine it into a high quality illuminating oil, and then take market share away from existing illuminants and, at the same time, build wholly new markets.
Fred returned to the U.S. on the eve of World War II and built an even larger fortune around Rock Island Refining, a refinery and oil-gathering pipeline system in southern Oklahoma, and a part-interest in a refinery outside of Minneapolis.
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Gas does now contribute 35% to power generation, but rock-bottom prices and a sniffiness about gas as oil's poor relation mean that exploiting its bounty (Saudi Arabia apparently has the world's fifth-largest gas reserves) has proven hard.
Fracking uses high-pressure mixtures of water, sand or gravel and chemicals to crack rock formations and release oil and natural gas deep underground.
Gamma-ray emitters bounce atomic particles off rock formations to see the size, density and flow of oil reservoirs.
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