George P. Mitchell (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. George Phydias Mitchell (born 1919) is an American businessman, real estate developer and philanthropist from Texas. He was born to Greek immigrant parents in the port city of Galveston, Texas. Mitchell earned a degree from Texas A&M University with an emphasis in geology and petroleum engineering. He started an independent oil and gas company, Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. and built it into a Fortune 500 company. In the 1980s and 1990s the company pioneered new technology for horizontal drilling of natural gas. This technique, combined with hydraulic fracturing of rock, makes it possible to economically extract natural gas from shale rock formations. The new approach has been widely adopted by the gas industry and spawned a new gas boom in North America. The Potential Gas Committee estimates that U.S. recoverable reserves will last 118 years at current production levels. Extracting natural gas from shale rock is rapidly spreading to countries outside the United States.