Resumen de There will be blood
It is no longer a purely traditional industry, is it? The way gas is exploited shifted quite dramatically in the US as high prices encouraged companies to look into fracking for gas, which led to a meteoric rise in horizontal rigs being drilled and, consequently, an uptick in demand for the minerals consumed by the fracking market - in proppants made from silica sand (whether coated or raw frac sand), in ceramic proppants made from bauxite and alumina (and sometimes less traditional materials like fly ash), in the minerals used in the chemical flush (borates, calcium carbonate) and in barite (barytes) and bentonite.
of course the oil and gas industry doesn't begin and end with shale gas in the US. Iran is the third largest producer of natural gas in the world and the sixth ranked producer of oil. It is a huge consumer of industrial minerals for the oil and gas industry and, as its economy continues to accelerate, of other industrial minerals too. It is also a significant producer of industrial minerals, although the recent lifting of sanctions is by no means the only issue the country has to overcome before it makes its mark on the world industrial minerals stage as it struggles to overhaul infrastructure ( pp25-26 ) and its processing sector ( pp50-51
