Beginning about 1976, groundbreaking research directed by the Department of Energy catalyzed several innovative industry ?firsts? that later became commercial technologies, and also resulted in the acquisition, analysis and wide dissemination of an enormous quantity of ?ground truth? data on a topic that at the time generated little interest: unconventional sources of natural gas. At the time, less than 7 percent of the natural gas produced from gas wells came from unconventional sources.