37
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. J. Soeder, Fracking and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59121-2_3
Chapter 3
The History of Oil & Gas Development
in the U.S.
In order to understand why there is fracking, it is important to understand the
historical context of the technology. Fracking, at its most basic, is nothing more
than a specialized reservoir stimulation method to engineer high-permeability flowpaths into an underground body of rock so the hydrocarbons can flow to a well and
be produced. So why was fracking needed?
Natural resources are usually produced by starting with whatever is easiest and
cheapest to extract. As those “high grade” resources get used up, producing the
remaining resource becomes increasingly difficult and costly, although there is generally a lot more of it (Soeder 2012). This distribution is known as the “resource
triangle” and it applies to nearly all natural resources, from drinking water to diamonds (Fig. 3.1).
In the United States, most of the “easy” oil and gas resources had been extracted
by the 1950s. The American oil industry had three options; (1) go after the more
difficult resources offshore or in remote locations like Alaska, (2) import the easy
resources from other countries overseas, or (3) try to produce the lower-grade,
tighter, and technically-challenging resources remaining in the lower 48. The industry was focused on the first two options from the 1960s to the 1990s, until fracking
technology matured enough to allow the third.
Petroleum has a history that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution by centuries.
Crude oil and bitumen were gathered from natural seeps thousands of years ago in
Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, who used it for architecture, road construction, waterproofing ships, and medicines. The Romans were
aware of rock oil and bitumen, and it was described by scholars like Pliny. However,
the Romans had little practical use for oil and regarded petroleum only as a curiosity
(Giddens 1938). The Chinese had an active petroleum production and distribution
industry as long ago as 100 B.C. (Harper 1998).
In the ninth century A.D., a Persian physician called Ibn Sina (c.980–1037)
described the medicinal uses of petroleum in his influential encyclopedia of medicine (McDonald 2011). These included various concoctions for eye diseases, reptile
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. J. Soeder, Fracking and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59121-2_3
Chapter 3
The History of Oil & Gas Development
in the U.S.
In order to understand why there is fracking, it is important to understand the
historical context of the technology. Fracking, at its most basic, is nothing more
than a specialized reservoir stimulation method to engineer high-permeability flowpaths into an underground body of rock so the hydrocarbons can flow to a well and
be produced. So why was fracking needed?
Natural resources are usually produced by starting with whatever is easiest and
cheapest to extract. As those “high grade” resources get used up, producing the
remaining resource becomes increasingly difficult and costly, although there is generally a lot more of it (Soeder 2012). This distribution is known as the “resource
triangle” and it applies to nearly all natural resources, from drinking water to diamonds (Fig. 3.1).
In the United States, most of the “easy” oil and gas resources had been extracted
by the 1950s. The American oil industry had three options; (1) go after the more
difficult resources offshore or in remote locations like Alaska, (2) import the easy
resources from other countries overseas, or (3) try to produce the lower-grade,
tighter, and technically-challenging resources remaining in the lower 48. The industry was focused on the first two options from the 1960s to the 1990s, until fracking
technology matured enough to allow the third.
Petroleum has a history that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution by centuries.
Crude oil and bitumen were gathered from natural seeps thousands of years ago in
Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, who used it for architecture, road construction, waterproofing ships, and medicines. The Romans were
aware of rock oil and bitumen, and it was described by scholars like Pliny. However,
the Romans had little practical use for oil and regarded petroleum only as a curiosity
(Giddens 1938). The Chinese had an active petroleum production and distribution
industry as long ago as 100 B.C. (Harper 1998).
In the ninth century A.D., a Persian physician called Ibn Sina (c.980–1037)
described the medicinal uses of petroleum in his influential encyclopedia of medicine (McDonald 2011). These included various concoctions for eye diseases, reptile