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I assumed “Oh, you put a wire on the pipe going down and it connects to a computer close to the drill bit.” No, because wires break. Instead, you put effectively a modem down by the drill and it turns data into a “mud pulse” to *communicate via creating waves in the sediment.*
Furthermore since the drill is loud when in operation historically you have to stop drilling to do data transfer, though apparently a technical innovation that I didn’t understand allows you to acoustically insulate a side channel for data transfer without ceasing drilling.
Also interesting: the supply chain for drilling involves a ecosystem/symphony of approximately 50 extremely specialized vendors per site. One reason US leads to much in field is winners win w/r/t developing expertise throughout supply chain; percolates abroad very slowly.
To oversimplify, in much of U.S. if you own a cornfield and it happens to be four kilometers above rich shale natural gas well congratulations now you own natural gas until you choose to alienate yourself from that. In much of rest of world, minerals default to gov’t.
And so doing first projects involving any amount of risk in countries X/Y/Z required convincing large bureaucracy to take tech and political risk. In U.S. it requires convincing one (1) farmer to take a check. Also creates organized local political pressure in favor of drilling.
Because, if your e.g. county won the geographic lottery, your landowning class (who have substantial political heft, always) have all just become very substantially richer *if and only if* polity can be convinced to allow fracking. So they organize to ensure that happens.