Role of federal government in natural gas boom debated

“And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock — reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground,” the president said Tuesday in his State of the Union address.

Industry experts say the federal government was involved in research — both directly and through tax credits to private companies — though there's some question about how much help it provided in advancing the breakthroughs that led to the shale gas revolution.

Ultimately, according to people who work for companies directly involved in developing the methods for extracting the shale gas, innovations in drilling and extracting the gas simply built on and applied innovations from decades previous.

“Everything that we do technologically is built on what people did before us,” said Dan Steward, a geologist who worked for George Mitchell, who is widely credited for breakthroughs in the Barnett Shale in Texas that spawned exploration and production in other shale formations.

Steward said in an interview that Mitchell's company spent years trying to crack the code of the Barnett Shale before proving that it could provide enough gas to be a commercial project.

Mitchell, he said, “put all the pieces together.”

Bob Inson, senior director for global gas at IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said a federal tax credit approved in 1980 for the recovery of unconventional gas was instrumental in getting the industry jump-started on the resource.