The Boom (14 page)

His backers didn’t care if he used a dowsing stick or a Ouija board, as long as he had a track record of using their money to make good wells. Mitchell was convinced that using science and technology was the path to success in Wise County. As it turned out, the secret to making these wells work was to frack them. “Hydraulic fracturing had just come in about two or three years before,” Mitchell said. “Without hydraulic fracturing, you couldn’t make decent wells.”

Using this new technique, Mitchell made good wells. He wasn’t fracking into the tightly packed Barnett Shale, but into a shallower sandstone with natural fractures. By shooting in gels, they were making new cracks that connected with existing cracks, building a drainage network for the gas. And it worked, opening up the rock enough to get gas to flow. Just as Mitchell began to create large gas wells, the whole campaign almost fell apart. He needed a way to get this gas out of the Dallas market, which was small and seasonal. Another company controlled production in the area and fought Mitchell’s attempts to build a pipeline that would have introduced unwanted competition. The case ended up before the Federal Power Commission in Washington, DC. It took so long to resolve that Mitchell’s leases were about to expire, which would have meant losing its most valuable asset: all of the land he had acquired cheaply before word got out that there was gas underneath. Mitchell threw a $5,000 chicken barbeque in 1956 to ask the landowners to be patient. The appeal to their patience—and their stomachs—worked. Finally, approval arrived to connect Mitchell’s new gas discoveries to an Amarillo-to-Chicago pipeline. Mitchell’s gas would head north to keep homes warm and factories running in the Midwest.

Mitchell’s discovery—called the Boonsville Bend conglomerate gas field—launched Mitchell Energy as a successful company. For decades, it was the largest discovery, by far, the company ever made. But he was scratching at the uppermost level of the gas. The real mother lode was underneath. The geological structure that Mitchell had found was trapping deep gas that over the centuries had migrated upward, seeking the lower pressure zones found closer to the surface. Something was even deeper that had cooked organic material over the millennia into natural gas. And while gas had escaped from this kitchen, an enormous amount remained inside the dense rocks of the Barnett Shale. For years after he began drilling in Wise and nearby counties, there was no real reason to give this deeper gas much thought. There was plenty of cheap-to-drill gas in the Boonsville. And there was no way to get the gas out of the shale rocks.

In the summer of 1973, Dennis Meadows was working at his home, a fifty-acre farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire, when his telephone rang. A year earlier, Meadows and his wife, Donella, had made the leap from obscure academics to bestselling authors. A team that Dennis Meadows had led at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had written a computer program that forecast the Earth’s future. It played with the complex relationships between food production, population, pollution, and resources, including energy. Cutting through the clutter of variables and inputs, the Meadowses asked a fairly basic question: If the Earth’s population continues to grow and more demands are put on the Earth’s resources, what will happen? Their conclusions were bleak. Massive economic collapse. Global epidemics. They published their work in March 1972 in a book called
The Limits to Growth
. It was, to everyone’s surprise, a media sensation and became a bestseller translated into a couple dozen languages.

Limits to Growth
emerged at a pessimistic time, and the book both captured and reinforced this worldview.
Time
magazine wrote a story about the Meadowses and their vision of a postapocalyptic world. “In the farm lands of the Ukraine, abandoned tractors litter the fields: there is no fuel for them. The waters of the Rhine, Nile, and Yellow rivers reek with pollutants,” the article warned. Some demographers found flaws in the Meadowses’ computer model, but these criticisms didn’t get a fraction of the attention the book received. The message of
Limits to Growth
resonated with a public in a gloomy mood. This book’s bleak vision—the human species was using up available resources—scared many people. They wanted to do something to fix the Earth’s problem, but weren’t sure what to do. They called the Meadowses.

It was not at all unusual for the rotary-dial wall phone in the Meadowses’ house to ring with strangers calling to talk about the coming global economic collapse. The Meadowses were as generous as possible with their time, but the calls were distracting. They ran the gamut from people who wanted to donate money to someone who had a macabre solution to global overpopulation. One man claimed to have developed a virus that would wipe out a significant portion of the world’s population. Fortunately, his offer of genocide didn’t go anywhere. Neither did most of the offers of money.

The call that arrived in the summer of 1973 was different. When Meadows answered, an executive assistant in Texas asked him to hold for George Mitchell. After a brief pause, Mitchell got on the phone. He started by saying that he had read
Limits to Growth
and was moved. “I have a lot of kids, and I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world with a lot of problems. I don’t want them to grow up in a world that is collapsing,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?”

The phone call began an unusual alliance between the Texas oilman and the doom-and-gloom academic. By this time Mitchell was a wealthy man. His days of deal making on the ground floor of the Esperson Building were over. Mitchell Energy was a substantial company—not a giant like Mobil or Amoco, but a respectably sized independent oil and gas explorer. Having pulled himself up from poverty to wealth, Mitchell’s focus began to meander. In the early 1970s, he attended a think-tank retreat in the Rocky Mountains, where he met and fell under the sway of Buckminster Fuller, the futurist and inventor. Fuller, an iconic figure at the time, popularized the term “Spaceship Earth.” The Earth’s resources, he argued, were limited and needed to be used wisely, not frittered away. Fuller first spurred Mitchell’s interest in growth and depletion. At the end of a few days spent with Fuller talking about global overpopulation and environmental catastrophes, the futurist asked the oilman, “What are you going to do about it?”

Mitchell’s response was to pay for a conference in Houston where futurists and thinkers gathered to discuss the challenges that faced the world. A primary focus of the conference was whether the billions of people would gobble up the Earth’s resources. This was a dark, Malthusian vision of the world. Yet Mitchell, the son of a penniless immigrant whose savvy had made him a multimillionaire, found it compelling. He committed $100,000 for a prize to be given to the paper with the best idea on “alternatives to growth.” The purpose of Mitchell’s phone call was to convince Meadows to organize the conference.

Meadows agreed, and the first conference convened near Houston in 1975. Mitchell enjoyed being surrounded by people who talked about vanishing biodiversity and sustainable ranching, solar energy and overpopulation. “We coined the expression ‘sustainability,’ ” Mitchell boasted later. That’s not true, but perhaps he helped popularize it. Other members of Houston’s Petroleum Club didn’t congregate at his conferences, where Mitchell listened to academics and think tankers discuss topics such as “The Helios Strategy—A Heretical View of the Role of Solar Energy in the Future of a Small Planet.” Indeed, few other business leaders attended, which bothered Mitchell. For most energy executives, then and now, growth is good. More people means more demand for energy. Economic growth also drives demand. Energy consumption increases alongside prosperity. What’s wrong with prosperity? they ask. Energy provides a better quality of life, with modern hospitals, air-conditioning, and one car, at least, per household.

Mitchell disagreed. The title of the first conference, “Alternatives to Growth,” reflected his way of thinking. He later donated $1 million to the National Academy of Sciences to research sustainable development, a topic that was largely neglected at the time. No one has ever totaled how much Mitchell gave over the years to support this research and conferences, but it ran to more than $10 million.

Although Mitchell hobnobbed with many leaders of the incipient environmental movement, he wasn’t an environmentalist. “Environmental protection is fine, but the most important issue to me is sustainability,” he said. The issue that mattered was the long-term survival of Spaceship Earth. Sustainability for him meant moving away from dirty fuels such as coal and oil. And renewable resources—wind and solar—weren’t ready to replace them. That left one fuel that was cleaner and available: natural gas. And he was ready to supply it. He had a gut feeling, a geological hunch, that his leases in North Texas held a lot more gas than anyone else thought.

One night in 1977, Darwin K. White looked out the kitchen window of his house, a couple dozen miles northwest of Fort Worth. A yellow glow from his well house caught his attention. At first it didn’t register. Why was the small shed that housed his water well glowing? Then it clicked, and he raced outside. By the time he crossed his backyard and threw open the door, flames were coming out of his well. The shed walls were scorched. His three-hundred-foot-deep water well into the Trinity Aquifer, which he used for drinking and raising a few head of cattle, had produced excellent water since he had moved in three years ago. Now it was pumping up natural gas.

“We felt that some way the gas drilling must be responsible for it,” White told me years later. “Less than a quarter mile to the west, a fellow had a well on his place. I thought his well might be related to our water problems. He didn’t take to that very well. His gas well was the best thing that ever happened to him, and he couldn’t believe it could be contaminating anyone’s water. I didn’t have the resources or energy to pursue it, but I know there is gas in the well because I saw it burning.”

White, who was then a hydraulics engineer at the Lockheed plant in nearby Fort Worth, lives in southern Wise County. A couple months before the fire in his well house, a local utility district began to lay pipes to provide municipal water to his neighborhood. He got a connection to the new public system, but losing a good water well like that didn’t sit right with him. He wrote a letter to the state’s oil and gas regulators. And then forgot about it. He doesn’t remember ever hearing anything back. The letter, however, prompted a state investigation and the first serious attempt to look at the natural gas wells that had made George Mitchell wealthy. By the end of 1977, Texas officials had investigated White’s well fire and other instances of wells spouting gas. Gas was showing up in the Trinity Aquifer in southern Wise County, the state concluded, and the “probable source” were wells that had inadequate surface casing. Mitchell Energy had drilled the majority of the wells in the area.

When wells are drilled, the uppermost section needs to be encased in cement. The cement extends downward, sometimes hundreds of feet, creating a barrier between the well and the shallow water aquifers. But as state officials examined how deep Mitchell’s surface casing was—and where the top of the Trinity Aquifer was—they realized that the surface casing wasn’t deep enough. All there was between the aquifer and a gas well was a steel pipe. If the steel pipe developed a hole—and steel left underground in the hot earth, exposed to corrosive gas and liquids, will develop a hole—there was nothing to prevent gas from getting into the water reservoir. The Texas Railroad Commission, the oddly named state oil and gas regulator, decided to take enforcement action.

Keeping oil and water from mixing might seem like a modern concern, but it dates back over a century. Back then, the issue was keeping the water out of the oil. Today it is keeping oil—and gas—out of the water. The first efforts to improve casing were in California, where a number of large oil fields were discovered around the turn of the twentieth century, including several around Bakersfield, north of Los Angeles. New wells began pumping increasing amounts of water. The water was fresh and was suspected to be entering the oil reservoir from abandoned wells that weren’t plugged adequately. In 1907 the Kern Trading and Oil Company hired five graduates of the Stanford University Department of Geology and Mining to study the subsurface geology of the new oil fields. They mapped the depths at which wells encountered water. The company didn’t want to protect the water. It wanted to protect the oil reservoirs. Too much water, after all, could wreak havoc with the oil reservoir and turn a productive field into one in which gallons of water needed to be pumped out to get a teaspoon of oil. Some companies realized it was in their interest to spend extra money to protect the long-term viability of their wells. Others weren’t so enlightened.