From around the world came news of shale gas developments, discoveries, technical breakthroughs and forecasts of a growing global gas glut.

For explorers this is unbridled good news. For oil company managers, investors and the Arab-led OPEC cartel, the news is a little less exciting because a glut in shale gas, and its close cousin, shale oil, could also mean a time of falling gas and oil prices.

To the fleetest, as ever, will go the spoils and while it is hard to say who will be the biggest winner there seems little doubt that the biggest loser will be Arab states, which have controlled the price of oil for decades but which are now being forced to consider a future of falling prices - just as the so-called "Arab spring" grips their region, complete with demands for more jobs and greater government spending on social welfare.

To say the least, shale gas is becoming a classic example of what that purported Chinese curse actually means - "may you live in interesting times".

So, what happened last week that causes The Slug to ratchet up his enthusiasm for the shale revolution, which old hands in the oil game prefer to call an evolution?

The two stand-out developments occurred in the US and Argentina.

In the US, a man responsible for the world's biggest shale gas exploration budget tipped an acceleration in the global spread of the shale boom - the viral phase as it might be called on the internet.

In Argentina, a world-class shale oil (and gas) discovery was reported confirming, if there was any doubt, that shales around the world will prove to be rich in hydrocarbons, so rich that they will change the structure and future of more than the oil sector - they will change the global economy.

Until a decade ago, shale gas was a phenomena confined to extracting small volumes from rock units such as the Marcellus and Barnett shales in the US. It was also a topic restricted to conversations in backroom bars and on the fringe of petroleum conferences - not the stuff of mainstream operators.

ExxonMobil changed that view of the shale game exactly two years ago when it plonked down $US31 billion to buy XTO Energy in a deal which gave the world's biggest corporate oil and gas producer access to an extra 45 trillion cubic feet of gas.

More big ticket deals followed but it was ExxonMobil's move on XTO which shifted shale gas to the front page of newspapers around the world and made it the top item at conferences.

Last week, the company which catapulted shale gas to centre-stage went a step further when one of its senior vice presidents, Mark Albers, predicted that not only had the US economy been changed by technologies which permit the cost-effective extraction of shale gas but that it was an industry which would go global.

"We do believe there is potential for unconventional oil development from shale resources globally," Albers said in an interview in Houston.

In a separate opinion column published in the Houston Chronicle newspaper, Albers ticked off some of the benefits which have flowed across shale-rich US states - North Dakota has enjoyed a direct $US5 billion benefit since 2009; Texas has benefitted from an $US11 billion injection; Pennsylvania has seen its economy boosted by $US10 billion.

Those are big numbers which will be repeated around the world, including that one-time economic basket case, Argentina, where the Spanish oil company, Repsol, last week reported a 1 billion barrel shale oil discovery from a tiny portion of its tenements in the south of the country.

Other countries will follow, with European eyes fixed firmly on Poland and Germany where the oil-rich basins which start in the North Sea flow under their flat northern plains.

Anyone who thinks The Slug is getting over-excited about the shale revolution is not thinking through the potential or the consequences.

The potential, as the man from ExxonMobil said and as Repsol demonstrated, is massive. Shale is one of the world's most common rock formations.

The technology developed in the US is easily exportable, and the targets for exploration are vast.

Imagine what will happen when someone in Saudi Arabia or Russia starts checking the data on old exploration wells to see whether any shales were showing hydrocarbon kicks on the way to a target - without any testing on the shale.

It is when you consider the big picture, and the way in which a shale gas glut has depressed the gas price in the US, that the true game-changer potential of shale is understood - and possibly feared.