Quick, name the most significant American innovation of the past ten years. How about hydraulic fracturing?
Okay, that's not an entirely new invention. As T. Boone Pickens has pointed out, people have been using pressurized fluid to split open rocks underground since the 1940s. But it wasn't until very recently that the U.S. natural gas industry, with support from the Energy Department, managed to refine their "fracking" techniques to drill into shale rock and extract natural gas and oil. Lots and lots of natural gas and oil.
