Bissell found out that some rock oil was a by-product obtained by drilling for salt.
In 1853 one George Bissell happened to notice a bottle of rock oil in a Dartmouth professor's office.
And wringing rock oil out of rags would not exactly get to scale.
Bissell hired Edwin Drake to drill for rock oil, not salt, and in 1859 Drake found what Bissell was looking for.
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.
Oil shale is sedimentary rock with oil in it that has historically been considered too expensive to process.
Each material has a unique "seismic velocity, " which helps determine the difference between rock and oil.
Fracking is the process of blasting water at high pressure into shale rock to release oil or gas held within it.
Drillers have learned to drill horizontally into long, thin seams of shale and other rock that holds oil, instead of searching for rare underground pools of hydrocarbons that have accumulated over millions of years.
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The drilling technique, which uses sand, water and chemicals under high pressure to extract oil and natural gas from rock formations, has helped Eagle Ford oil production grow by 184% last year compared with 2011, according to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the state's oil and gas exploration and production.
Merrell spent five years "mentally" designing an oil shale "retort, " in which pulverized rock is baked, and vaporized oil extracted.
Fracking involves injecting water, sand and some chemicals deep into the earth to crack shale rock, which frees oil and gas.
Most of those chemicals are designed to stay underground, where they react with the rock and help the oil and gas flow.
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Fracking uses high-pressure mixtures of water, sand or gravel and chemicals to crack rock formations and release oil and natural gas deep underground.
Wells in shale plays have to undergo a process known as fracturing to boost the porosity of the rock and to make oil and gas flow to the well head.
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The IEA said the reason for this was the big growth and development in the US of extracting oil from shale rock.
Gronholm had been leading the event by 40 seconds when he hit a rock, which caused an oil leak and ended his rally.
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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.
During fracking, large volumes of water, along with sand and hazardous chemicals, are injected into the ground to break rock apart and free the oil and gas.
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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Rock 'n' rollers, oil up your walkers and aim them at your nearest Best Buy come Nov. 23.
Of course, the fly in the natural gas ointment is fracking, the hydraulic fracturing of underground rock to extract more gas and oil.
The carbon dioxide, injected deep into the reservoir, basically scours the oil out of the rock and pushes it upward where it can flow into a well.
Local responders have built barriers of rock and dirt to stop the oil from contaminating the lake, and Exxon Mobil put booms into the lake as a precaution.
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The test well, Jack-2, delved through 7, 000 feet of water and 20, 000 feet of sea floor to tap oil trapped in tertiary rock laid down 60 million years ago.
The big growth in oil extracted from shale rock means the US will not need to import any crude within two decades, the former boss of BP has said.
The problem is the oil is locked inside the rock and until now, nobody's found a cheap way to get it out.
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Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, has unleashed a boom in energy production in the United States by allowing the extraction of oil and gas from shale rock.
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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The market cap of Petrobras has shed billions since she took over from what many Petrobras watchers say is nothing more than a policy instrument for Brasilia to funnel money to pet projects, rather than an actual oil company drilling below sand and rock salt in the Atlantic Ocean.
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