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Comment by prpl | Hacker News Reader

Ironic that fracking experience proved to be the technology enabler here.

Horizontal drilling predates the fracking boom. It's an adjacent technology. Your overall point stands, though.

A lot of geology is funded by petrochemicals and mining companies, since they invest top dollar into figuring out what’s under us.

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the professional organisation of geology professionals, is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

This is an outlier amongst US professional science associations:

- Physics: APS, College Park, MD

- Astronomy: AAS, Washington, DC

- Chemistry: ACS, Washington, DC

- Biology: ASBMB, Rockville, MD; ASCB, Bethesda, MD; ESA, Washington, DC; AIbS, Washington, DC.

- Psychology: APA, Washington, DC

- Sociology: ASA, Washington, DC.

- Political Science: APSA, Washington, DC.

- Economics: AEA, Nashville, TN.

(That last ... surprised me.)

The members and officers of the AEA are geographically distributed at universities around the country, and their biannual conference moves around from city to city, but their Secretary–Treasurer is a professor at Vanderbilt (the previous Secretary–Treasurer was also a professor at Vanderbilt) and they have a permanent office in Nashville.

Yeah, I get that.

I'm just ... curious as to how the AEA came to be at Vanderbilt / Nashville, and if that's always been the case. I've searched a bit on the history w/o success.

AEA was founded in Saratoga Springs, NY, by amongst others Richard T. Ely (interesting history), though I don't see any obvious Tennessee connection by him, or cofounders Katharine Coman (Wellesley College) or Edwin R.A. Seligman (Columbia University).

My impression is that Saratoga Springs is just where their first conference was. I don’t think they ever had an office there. I couldn't figure out in a brief search if they had a prior permanent office before the one in Nashville.

That is in fact what I was trying to say about Sarasota Springs ;-)

My next tack is to track down old copies of AEA journals (AER, J. Ec. Lit., J. Ec. Persp.) and see where they're published from or where they otherwise indicate location.

Genuinely curious here: who was doing horizontal drilling before fracking, and what were they doing with it?

Drilling through more conventional formations (oil or gas) that didn't need fracking. Particularly on formations with large, flat layers it could greatly reduce the number of wells needed, vs. vertical drilling. It's also very useful for offshore drilling.

Measurement-while-drilling (where instruments in the drill string sense the surrounding formation, allowing it to follow ups and downs in the layers) is quite a technical accomplishment. Think about the problem of getting data back to the surface.

It's called directional drilling [0] and is related to milkshakes [1]

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_drilling

1 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a5d9BrLN5K4&pp=ygUddGhlcmUgd2l...

Construction projects frequently use it on a small scale when excavation or disturbing existing infrastructure isn’t possible. For example, you need to lay an electric cable for a new development across a road and you can’t shut down the road, so you drill horizontally underneath it and run the cable through.

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