History
The formation is named after Chris W. Barnett who settled in San Saba County during the late 19th century where he named a local stream the Barnett Stream. During the early 20th century during a geological mapping geologists noted a thick black organic-rich shale in an outcrop close to the stream. The shale was consequently named the Barnett Shale.
The Barnett shale has acted as a source and sealing cap rock for more conventional oil and gas reservoirs in the area. It was thought that only a few of the thicker sections close to Fort Worth would be able to support economic drilling, until new advances in horizontal drilling were developed in the 1980s. Techniques such as fracturing, or "fracking", wells, used by Mitchell Energy, opened the possibility of more large scale production. Even with new techniques, significant drilling did not begin until gas prices increased in the late 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Barnett Shale
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”
—Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)