George P. Mitchell

George Phydias Mitchell was an American businessman and petroleum engineer, born May 21, 1919 in Galveston, Texas and died July 26, 2013 in the same city, known as the pioneer of the economic extraction of shale gas through hydraulic fracturing. After graduating valedictorian from Texas A&M University with a petroleum engineering degree in 1940, he built Mitchell Energy & Development Corporation into a Fortune 500 company through the drilling of roughly ten thousand wells, more than a thousand of them wildcat exploratory wells. Beginning in the 1980s his company spent almost two decades refining hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques against the tight rock of the Barnett Shale formation in Texas before the combination proved commercially viable in the late 1990s, touching off the shale gas boom that reshaped American natural gas production. Devon Energy acquired Mitchell Energy in 2002, and Mitchell went on to give away or pledge more than 900 million dollars through the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, including over 100 million dollars to his alma mater, joining the Giving Pledge in 2010.