The Boom (12 page)

The paper drew the attention of one of the preeminent engineers of the day, M. King Hubbert. It “was very, very important and naturally attracted a great deal of excitement,” he recalled later. Oil companies adopted fracking rapidly. By 1955, less than a decade after the first experiments, more than one hundred thousand wells had been fracked.

Hubbert is best remembered today as the father of peak oil theory. His argument was that the amount of oil in the world is finite and that as production increases, it will reach a peak and then begin to decline. Drawn on a graph, his forecast resembled a bell curve. In the late 1940s, he became interested in the question of how many years of oil supply could be pumped out of the earth and set out to figure it out. At the same time, he studied hydraulic fracturing and wrote a seminal paper on the new technology. The two interests were connected. If hydraulic fracturing could significantly increase the availability of oil and gas, it would make more oil available and push back the date of “Hubbert’s Peak.” But he was not impressed with Stanolind’s hydrafracs. In his famous 1956 paper outlining his ideas on peak oil, he noted that only about one-third of the oil in a reservoir was being recovered. The rest was out of reach. New techniques, he wrote, “are gradually being improved so that ultimately a somewhat larger but still unknown fraction of the oil underground should be extracted.”

He calculated that peak oil in the United States would occur between 1965 and 1970, and these new technologies would, at best, slow the decline on the far side of the bell curve. Despite familiarizing himself with hydraulic fracturing, Hubbert fundamentally misjudged its impact. US oil production did peak in 1970, as he predicted, and began to decline. By 2008, it was half the level of the peak. But then it started to increase again—in 2009 and each year for the next several years. We have left Hubbert’s bell curve, and it’s all due to the work begun by Farris and Fast.

Fracking techniques evolved quickly. By 1956, companies had begun using more and more water, with fewer additives, as a frack fluid. This ran counter to conventional wisdom, which held that water would damage the reservoir and prevent oil and gas from escaping. Laboratory engineers recommended against using water, but early efforts in the oil fields proved successful. Cheaper than crude oil, water allowed companies to increase the amount of fluid they injected into wells. Fracks that used five to ten times as much fluid as the early Stanolind efforts became commonplace. Injection rates increased twentyfold, pumping in more fluid to put more pressure on the rocks and create more fractures. In addition, innovative pumping equipment added more horsepower to the job.

Bob Fast and his colleagues at Stanolind continued their work on hydraulic fracturing through the years. The company grew interested in using highly explosive rocket fuel to make larger fractures. This decision was ill fated. On November 11, 1970, a work crew drilled a hole to test the fuel as a frack fluid. A piece of equipment was backed into an electric line, somehow triggering an explosion. The blast killed eight workers and blasted a hole five feet deep and twenty-five feet across. Fast, typically the on-site supervisor, wasn’t there. He was away on his annual deer hunting trip. His son said he had survivor’s guilt and wondered if he could have prevented the accident had he been there. Fast retired a couple years later with an impressive list of accomplishments: thirty-five patents and twenty-five published technical papers.

Hubbert’s famous paper isn’t all doom and gloom. He was a pessimist about the longevity of oil supply, but he believed that coal’s abundance would provide fuel well into the future. The possibility of nuclear energy excited him. When he presented his paper, the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant was under construction in Seascale, England. Bob Fast shared Hubbert’s enthusiasm for nuclear energy. Years later, Fast would get mad at the television whenever the news showed antinuclear protests. He grew up in the Great Depression and was unable to join the Boy Scouts because his family didn’t have enough money for dues. He drew a line connecting abundant energy and the postwar American boom. To him, protesting nuclear energy was tantamount to protesting cheap energy and economic well-being.

By 1959, the oil industry was also interested in the power unleashed by nuclear reactions, but for an entirely different reason. It wanted to use nuclear bombs to frack wells. Edward Teller, a father of the hydrogen bomb, convened a meeting that year at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory—now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—to discuss peaceful uses of nuclear power. Teller suggested it could be used for mining and excavation. The US Atomic Energy Commission agreed and created Project Plowshare, named after the biblical verse from the book of Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” The program focused first on using the power of the atom as a massive earthmover. The government toyed with the idea of using bombs to carve out a new deepwater harbor in Alaska and build a new canal through Panama. None of these ideas ever made it off the drawing board, beset by technical problems and environmental worries. But a partnership between the government and El Paso Natural Gas became a reality. The Plowshare scientists wanted to know whether using nuclear blasts to fracture rocks around wells would work and be cost effective. “Aspects outside the scope of a technical program—political, sociological, and psychological considerations—were not matters of AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] concern,” notes
The Nuclear Impact: A Case Study of the Plowshare Program to Produce Gas by Underground Stimulation in the Rocky Mountains
, a 1976 book about the program written by Frank Kreith and Catherine B. Wrenn. This oversight would doom nuclear fracturing, as would another problem.

In 1967, scientists detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb outside of Farmington, New Mexico. Cheered by local civic leaders and state officials, the bomb was lowered three-quarters of a mile into a gas well, nestled in a shale rock formation. The resulting blast cleared out a cavity about 160 feet across. Called Project Gasbuggy, the blast worked. But the gas that flowed into the well contained radioactive tritium and other isotopes. Plowshare scientists decided to get bigger, in an effort to get out more gas and improve the economic return of spending tens of millions of dollars on bombs. The next detonation was called Rulison, after a town on the interstate in western Colorado. The Rulison bomb was bigger—forty-three kilotons—and exploded deeper in the ground. (For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 was about thirteen kilotons.) With little fanfare, the Rulison bomb was detonated in September 1969, in the waning days of the summer of Woodstock. This time measurements indicated rock fractured 250 feet from ground zero. It was called a “rubble chimney,” a term to describe the extent of the smashed rock. When gas came out of the well, it was commingled with high levels of tritium and krypton-85. The Atomic Energy Commission studied potential exposure if the gas were put into pipelines and delivered to homes. The two cities that would receive the highest dosage of radioactivity from burning the gas to heat homes or cook food were Rifle, near the bomb site, and Aspen. The dosage was small, but this was only a single well.

These muscular attempts to smash open the rock caught the attention of the White House. In a 1971 energy speech, Richard Nixon talked about how finding more natural gas will “be one of our most urgent energy needs in the next few years.” And he threw his support for “nuclear stimulation experiments which seek to produce natural gas from tight geologic formations which cannot presently be utilized.” With backing from the top, Project Plowshare and its industry allies upped the ante. The next test would explode three nuclear bombs simultaneously—each one larger than the bomb used for Gasbuggy. They would be placed far enough from each other that the impact zones would create a vast vertical column of cracked rock from which gas could flow.

Advocates believed that they could blast their way out of the energy deficit that the United States was entering. They hoped it could become a common oil-field tool—“something we can use any day of the week in any gas field,” said an El Paso engineer. The Rio Blanco blast, also in western Colorado, took place in May 1973, at a time of natural gas shortages. A couple months earlier, the reality of the energy crisis hit home when Denver public schools had shuttered because there wasn’t enough gas to heat the buildings. Project sponsors of the blast created a newsletter—the
Rio Blanco News
—and announced in the first issue, “Gas from Project Rio Blanco Unit Could Equal 10-Year Supply for the States.” This optimism did not match the results. The three bombs created rubble chimneys, but the fractured rock from each blast didn’t connect. Gas emerged only from the uppermost blast. Instead of a ten-year supply of gas, the main legacy of the blast is an official plaque at ground zero warning against digging the soil or drilling down without permission from the government.

Undaunted, Project Plowshare planners kept getting more ambitious. The next test, called Project Wagon Wheel, involved five hundred-kiloton devices. And this array was just the beginning. If successful, the Atomic Energy Commission and El Paso envisioned forty to fifty detonations a year in southern Wyoming. But this time the atomic promoters and engineers met their match. Local residents organized to stop it. There was concern about the impact of so much earth shaking on local roads and irrigation ditches. The economics of nuking gas wells was also questionable. The Department of Energy later pointed out that $82 million had been spent on the project, but even if the gas wells flowed for twenty-five years, only a fraction of the cost would be recovered.

It is not clear when Wagon Wheel was killed, but Congressman Teno Roncalio, a Democrat who was Wyoming’s only member of the House of Representatives, delivered the coup de grace. In January 1973 he was appointed to Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. A week later, Roncalio announced that funding for Wagon Wheel was being removed from the federal budget. In 1978 Roncalio decided not to run for reelection. An opening emerged for an aspiring young Republican. He would win the seat and go on to play a crucial role in the spread of hydraulic fracturing as chief executive of Halliburton. His name was Dick Cheney.

While interest in nuclear fracking disappeared, concerns about energy supply grew stronger. In November 1973 Richard Nixon pledged to end oil imports by 1980. He failed, although he resigned less than a year after making this vow. In a short speech on energy, he asked Americans to turn down their thermostats by six degrees. “My doctor tells me that in a temperature of sixty-six to sixty-eight degrees, you are really more healthy than when it is seventy-five to seventy-eight, if that is any comfort,” he said. It wasn’t. Natural gas was in such short supply that Congress passed a law in 1978 that essentially outlawed the construction of new gas-fired power plants. By the time the law was repealed nine years later, the United States had built 81 gigawatts’ worth of power plants that burned dirty, reliable chunks of fossilized carbon—about a quarter of all coal plants that were still in use more than thirty years later. Government officials felt they didn’t have a choice. The size of new discoveries was shrinking, and four out of every five wells drilled were unsuccessful.

Faced with a full-blown energy crisis, the government responded in myriad ways. There were efforts to cut demand for energy. Speed limits were lowered to conserve fuel. And there were attempts to boost the supply of energy, including the little-known Unconventional Gas Research Program (UGR). Funding for this endeavor was fairly small: $30 million was its best year. Beginning in 1977 and for the next few years, much of the money went to a small federal research unit in Morgantown, West Virginia, allotted for the study of natural gas in shales found in Appalachia. The energy industry knew there was gas in these shales, but wells were small and unpredictable. Only in places where the shale was naturally fractured—and shallow—did energy companies bother to try. The UGR wanted to change that. It deployed geologists across the region to study rock characteristics. And it drilled a handful of wells. As far as fracking them, nothing was off the table. UGR tried fracks with chemical explosives and even freezing the rocks with cryogenics.

Located on a hill above the Monongahela River, the Morgantown Energy Technology Center began life soon after World War II as a place to research turning the region’s plentiful coal into synthetic gas. Al Yost joined the center in the mid-1970s. A local kid, he grew up in West Virginia in a family that had an oil and gas business. He didn’t want to leave his hilly home and wondered if new technologies could unlock the region’s shales. “Conventional resources were drying up domestically, and there was a need to start looking at harder-to-get gas,” he said. “We were interested in self-sufficiency, reducing our imports, and producing our domestic resources.”

Over the course of a decade, Yost helped pioneer many new technologies that would set the stage for the rise of hydraulic fracturing. He and his fellow engineers placed tiny cameras in the wells to figure out what was happening and shot sound waves underground to map the fractures being created, borrowing a technology developed by federal scientists. They tried the first massive hydraulic fractures of shales—twenty years before Mitchell Energy deployed a similar approach. “Most of the industry was ignoring us or saying we don’t care about these shales, we’re off in a foreign country developing larger, high rate of return resources,” said Yost.