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We are a net exporter of both oil and LNG because of two technological breakthroughs:
* the development of hydraulic fracturing of shale, using liquids rather than explosives and
* the development of both diagonal and horizontal drilling techniques.
Both occurred around 1947 when Trump was 1 years old!!!!!
The Bakken boom was well under way long before Trump took office (GWB administration), and persisted in spite of Obama, partly because the majority of Bakken/Three Forks development is on private land, and privately owned mineral rights.
I was working Bakken wells in Elm Coulee Field (MT) in 2000, and later in North Dakota, where the boom became big news about 2006. Our big problem was one of takeaway capacity, and while everyone hoped the Keystone XL pipeline would alleviate some of that, it's
still being stonewalled in the courts.
Another pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipe Line (DAPL) had run afoul of not only the usual ecowhackos but the Obama Administration as well, and later the "Water Protectors" of the Standing Rock Sioux, who hoped to extract money to shut up after the company building the pipeline decided they could go around the reservation cheaper than cut across a corner of it. That protest caught fire in the news, attracting the radical enviros, Hollywood types, and the whole protest thing got out of hand, especially for a pipeline that didn't pass through tribal land and had over 100 minor reroutes to preserve 'cultural resources', a euphemism for 'any place someone might have camped out' back when.
When the protests were shut down, the water protectors only left behind some 720 semi loads of trash and debris, a human body in one of the creeks, and millions of dollars in damages to public and private property.
What Trump did do:
Stopped the stonewalling on the completion of the DAPL (allowing over 500,000 BOPD to exit the Williston Basin on its way to refineries by pipeline, once completed). Consider that is only a fraction of the 1.4 million barrels of oil produced in the State daily, the rest must leave by train or truck, and other pipelines would help. They are in the works, and this administration is more likely to permit infrastructure to be built than the previous one.
The development of horizontal drilling methods that allowed 9500 ft. or more of a target zone to be opened up that would only have been 20 ft. thick in a single vertical wellbore is the tech that made that boom possible. Hydraulic fracturing went hand in hand with that tech, but no one ever used explosives to frac a horizontal well here, only to perforate liners and casing.
The things involved were:
MWD technology to get survey data to surface in a few minutes instead of a couple of hours, and tools to provide continuous gamma ray readings for navigation, geologically.
Mud motors which were more reliable and durable.
Bit technology which could survive the demands of being run at speeds of 120+ RPM in often abrasive environments, for days on end.
(Specifically, PDC bits which could survive in carbonate formations and siliciclastics. )
Top drive rigs (as opposed to Kelly Rigs) and changes in drilling techniques which saved time.
Later, walking rigs which could move from wellhead to wellhead on a multi well production pad without being dismantled.
I worked my first horizontal well with MWD in 1990, a lot later than 1947, although the tech we used was used in the 80s.
Consider we were using the 'cutting edge' laptops and desktop computers available then, commonly running Windows 3.11 or 95 or 98SE. Now you can almost do more faster with a decent smart phone.
While there were directional drilling techniques prior to the development of MWD tools (which required computer development only dreamed of in the 40s), they used mechanical or film type survey tools which required a considerable wait as the tools were sent to bottom and extracted on wirelines inside the drill pipe before drilling could proceed. Drilling a directional or horizontal well back then was an expensive proposition, today the frac job costs more than the hole.
