WHAT GOOD IS THE DEPT. OF ENERGY?

A lot of conservatives want to eliminate it but that would not be a good move because DOE has played  crucial role in developing fossil fuel technologies.

A boom in shale gas? Credit the feds.
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Published: December 16
WASHINGTON POST
The breakthroughs that revolutionized the natural gas industry — massive hydraulic fracturing, new mapping tools and horizontal drilling — were made possible by the government agencies that critics insist are incapable of investing wisely in new technology.

This will surprise those steeped in the hagiography of George Mitchell, the tenacious Texas oil man who proved that gas could be drawn from shale rock at a profit. 

Slick-water fracking, the technology that Mitchell used to crack the shale gas code, was adapted from massive hydraulic fracturing, a technology first demonstrated by the Energy Department in 1977. 

Mitchell learned of shale’s potential from the Eastern Gas Shales Project, a partnership begun in 1976 between the Energy Department’s Morgantown Energy Research Center and dozens of companies and universities that sought to demonstrate natural gas recovery in shale formations and to map and test core samples from unconventional natural gas deposits.

The third critical technology was horizontal drilling and well installation, a breakthrough that captured much more shale gas than conventional vertical wells had. The government had supported innovative drilling methods since the ’70s; in 1976, two government engineers, Joseph Pasini III and William K. Overby Jr., patented an early-stage directional drilling technology that became the precursor to horizontal drilling.

The Energy Department also pioneered better drill bits and air-based drilling, which better protected the gas assets of geological formations. And in 1991, the publicly funded Gas Research Institute recommended that Mitchell experiment with horizontal drilling and even subsidized his first horizontal well.