It got worse when they opened the Windows to let the tear gas out and also let in a hard wind off the Texas plains, which stoked the flames.

Conventional gas production is relatively easy, but getting gas out of unconventional sources requires some physical and chemical violence to make the rocks more permeable.

FOR over a decade Royal Dutch Shell, along with its Japanese partners, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, has been struggling to coax oil and gas out of the frozen seas off Sakhalin Island, in Russia's far east.