Over the past few decades, we have seen several changes in how oil companies search and extract oil and natural gas resources from the earth, explains Brian Alfaro, President of Alfaro Oil and Gas. However, there will always be one thing about the oil and natural gas drilling industry that will remain unchanged. Much controversy will continue to surround the process until people are better educated regarding the process. Although we have been able to see major improvements in how oil and natural gas are extracted over just the past few decades, many people still view this method of providing ourselves with our own natural resources as harmful to our earth.

Many years ago, there was only one way to locate these natural resources and that was to look for evidence on the surface of these underground shale rock formations, notes Brian Alfaro. The people who looked for deposits from oil and natural gas at that time had to scour an entire area and look for any sign of seepage before they could tell if any resources were available in the area. Now we know that there is a low percentage of oil and natural gas that makes it to the earth's surface and that method was actually a very inaccurate form of oil and natural gas exploration. It led to countless drillings at sites that were thought to be full of these resources and ultimately they were not. Thanks to improvements in technology, we are now able to get a more precise reading and make better drilling attempts than in the past.

Current improvements in technology have made things much easier for those who work in the oil and natural gas industry as opposed to how things were decades ago. Now geologists and geophysicists are able to use the latest technological advancements in order to gather precise data from deep below the earth's surface so that they are able to make a more precise educated guess as to whether or not the area is sufficient in oil and natural gas resources. In the past, those who worked in the oil and natural gas industry had to depend on unreliable methods such as looking at the earth's surface for any seepage of oil or natural gas resources in order to determine if an area was a promising place to start drilling. Today, this is not the case and we have more accurate ways to get this information according to Brian Alfaro [http://www.briankalfaro.org].

By taking advantage of the scientific improvements in the oil industry, geologists are able to calculate the amount of oil that can be extracted from a layer of shale rock that is located deep below the earth's surface. This means that less drilling will occur in areas that cannot provide us with a sufficient amount of resources and therefore the oil industry will leave a smaller carbon footprint behind.

Many improvements are being made to help the oil industry to be a more eco-friendly corporation as well as provide these drill site workers with the insight that they need in order to choose the very best drilling sites possible in order to obtain the most resources from a single drill site.