Centre Rock founder and president Brandon Fisher, who was personally congratulated by US President Barack Obama when his small company engineered and manufactured a drill and pod to rescue trapped miners more than 2000ft underground a Chilean mine in 2010, detailed the technology to Energy News.

"There really isn't anything in the market that compares to our directional air percussion hammer, so that's something we're very excited about," Fisher said.

Hydraulic fracturing - which pumps liquids down a well into subsurface rock units under pressures high enough to split the rock to create a network of interconnected fractures to serve as pore spaces to get oil and gas out - has revolutionised global energy markets and rebooted the US manufacturing sector by decimating the price of gas and unlocking vast reserves of oil.

The US is now exporting gas for the first time in its history and it's less reliant on the Middle East for its oil.

Yet new technology being worked on at Centre Rock - headquartered out of Berlin in south-western Pennsylvania - will allow both oil and gas drillers to undertake directional drilling through hard rock gas and oil-bearing formations.

Present air motor and mud motor technology is very slow and inefficient when drilling in hard rock, where there are shallow formations even at 200-300m which are likely to be gas-bearing but the industry ignores because it would be simply uneconomic to develop, even at oil prices above $US100/bbl.

"This new tool we are in the process of manufacturing, designing and building will penetrate very quickly and very efficiently through those hard rock formations," Fisher told Energy News.

"We really think it's going to be game-changer in terms of opening up gas-bearing and oil-bearing formations that are too hard to drill with present-day technology.

"The problem with hydraulic fracturing is drilling horizontally through the hard rock. That's the solution that we're providing.

"The technology that they're using today is not made for extremely hard rock. Presently we're just drilling a vertical hole through it and not even getting the gas out; we're just drilling through it and ignoring it.

"Now we'll be able to drill horizontally through there and get a very high yield of gas."

While Centre Rock's planned technology - which is slated for release next year all going well - will likely be more readily accessible for the non-shale, tight gas plays in Pennsylvania, Fisher said it would also have global applications for hard rock unconventional plays.

Back in business?

While some 25,000 gas wells were drilled in Pennsylvania between 2007 and 2014, many have now been capped and suspended while prices are week, and will not be revisited until oil and gas prices recover.

In the state local gas prices are among the lowest in the US because of a lack of pipelines to transport the gas out of region.

And while there have been reports from some analysts who have said US shale producers are back in business at $50/bbl, Fisher said that's not exactly the reality on the ground in Pennsylvania.

"We are still at where I would consider rock bottom," Fisher said.

"The volume of drilling that is happening now versus two years ago is down almost 70% for gas drilling.

"Oil and natural gas run parallel in terms their demand. If oil gets back into the mid-$60s people will start to be profitable again and will start to invest in natural gas as well.

"Today we're roughly $US2.50/thousand cubic feet; we really should be in that $US3.50-4/Mcf range to make it economic.

"Right now most of your oil companies and gas companies are losing a lot of money."

Fisher said that while it was "too early to say" what impact the technology Centre Rock is developing will have on drillers' true direct costs, "it will help".

"The more important thing is that it's allowing us to tap more resources, because these are resources that we can't get to today," he said.

"When you look at the global availability of natural gas, this will help the potential for more gas and oil to be explored."

Energy News toured Pennsylvania's oil and gas supply chain as a guest of CORE PA, an initiative established to increase the visibility of a 53-county footprint within Pennsylvania to international and domestic investors.