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The life he lived. <\/strong><\/span>George Mitchell, born 1919.<\/p>\n How to Frack Shale: Drill down to a layer of shale. Detonate charges to create fissures in the rock. Pump a water, chemical and sand mixture into the crevices, creating better pathways for natural gas to escape. Capture the gas that escapes.<\/em><\/p>\n The New York Times Magazine this weekend devoted its issue to the lives of neat people. George Mitchell was among the neatest (in my humble opinion):<\/p>\n \u00a0He fracked until it paid off.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the gas industry, an exploration area tends to be described as a “play.” In 1981, George Mitchell, one of the most powerful natural-gas barons in Texas, began to look for a play in an unlikely place: the Barnett Shale, a thick layer of rock, thousands of square miles in area, located deep under the land around Fort Worth. For years, oil and gas companies had succeeded in bringing up fuel from above and below the shale. Mitchell decided to drill into the shale and fracture it with highly pressurized fluids, freeing natural gas to be drawn to the surface. “We had people who told us we were nuts,” Dan Steward, a geologist who helped manage the Barnett project, recalls. “But for George Mitchell” – whose North Texas wells were drying up – “this was survival, this was need.”<\/p>\n Mitchell did not invent hydraulic fracturing, or fracking; it was first tried in the late 1940s and helped along by Department of Energy research in the 1970s. Before Mitchell, however, fracking had not been used commercially to free natural gas from shale. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Mitchell Energy drilled well after well, many of whose sites were determined personally by Mitchell, an expert geologist who dropped by his company’s engineering department daily to check for good news. For 15 years, the company struggled to show that its fracking could produce reliable and economical gas. At one point in the late 1990s, his son Todd recalls, Mitchell expressed incredulity that a few upstarts in Silicon Valley could write a software program and sell their company for a billion dollars. That was nearly the value of Mitchell Energy at the time, a company with some 2,000 employees, vast land holdings – and an uncertain future.<\/p>\n In 1997, one of Mitchell’s shale gas wells, aided by the injection of a water, sand and chemical mixture (rather than more expensive foams and gels), established that fracking could prove financially viable over the long term. Not long after, Mitchell sold his company for $3.5 billion. By then, fracking was on its way to resurrecting America’s oil-and-gas industry. New horizontal drilling techniques made shale gas wells even more productive, and by 2012, shale gas accounted for about 35 percent of the country’s natural-gas production. Daniel Yergin, the oil-industry analyst and historian, says Mitchell’s fracking technique is so far “the most important, and the biggest, energy innovation of this century.” It is also the most environmentally controversial.<\/p>\n Is the measure of an innovator marked by surpassing technological ingenuity, or by unswerving determination? Surely Mitchell had some of the former, but more of the latter. Through 15 years of failure, he ignored the supposed wisdom of the crowd. “In science, you have to be very aware of consensus,” says Steward, the former Mitchell Energy manager. “It’s based on people’s theories and models at the time. And sometimes it’s damn wrong. And in this case it was damn wrong.” In the end, Mitchell proved that there is no innovative force quite so powerful as the problem-solver able to balance the world’s disbelief with a resolute belief in himself.<\/p>\n Things I learned over Christmas:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n 1. It’s not easy to return stuff to Amazon. In fact, they won’t take some things back. Be wary what you buy from them.<\/p>\n 2. Everything you own should have entry in a file. What it exactly is. What model numbers. What color. Who made it. Where you bought it. How you get another one. An amazing number of products — from door hinges to light fixtures — don’t have the maker’s name on it. Or, God forbid, a phone number or a web address. Surely they want me to buy more?<\/p>\n 3. Our DSL Internet line in the country was slow. I checked the phone company’s web site. Their minimum speed for new customers was more than twice what I was getting. I called. They doubled me. Seems they were upgrading their offerings for new customers, but forgot the old ones. We’re now up to 4.4 megs. Our neighbor is 0.6 — about a\u00a0 seventh what we get. He should get more.<\/p>\n 4. Everything is negotiable. Canon wanted too much to repair a G1X. I called and begged. They cut their charge by half. It came back quickly. And the camera actually seems to work, though I still prefer their G15. Ditto for tomorrow’s hotel and the free upgrade.<\/p>\n 5. The U.S. banking \/ credit card industry is a disgrace. What with credit cards that seem to be easy to be stolen (Target just lost 40 million) and its ridiculous love affair with paper checks. My cousin from Australia saw a pile of checks on my desk and scoffed. “I’ve haven’t received a check in over a year,” he said. “Everything in Australia is done with EFT — electronic funds transfer. I can send and receive electronic funds for free from every bank in Australia,” he continued. In contrast, one of my local New York City banks charges a whopping $13 to receive an incoming wire for me and charges $20 to send a wire. What moron invented 4-digit Pin numbers? A computer can try the 9999 alternatives in seconds. My cousin carried an Australian debit card containing $5,000 in US. dollars. He uses the card like cash. It’s not linked to his bank account — unlike all the debit cards Target lost.<\/p>\n 6. It’s always easier to fix things the second time.<\/p>\n 7. American Hustle is probably a great movie — if you can hear all the dialog. I couldn’t.<\/p>\n But I have a solution: Sennheiser RS 120 wireless headphones.<\/p>\n![\"HowtoFrack\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/HowtoFrack.jpg\")
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