The Boom (2 page)

In 2008 a small Canadian energy advisory firm issued a report titled
The “Shale Gas Revolution
.” The name stuck and is now used widely, mostly by supporters of this new energy production who want to emphasize how big and pervasive the changes are. I also refer to it as a revolution, but for different reasons. It is a revolution because the old order is tumbling. King Coal’s reign as the nation’s predominant fuel for making electricity is tenuous, and even petroleum’s stranglehold on powering vehicles is weakening. As with many revolutions throughout history, once change is set in motion, the end result can be unexpected. Revolutions also create their own stories, creation myths, and hagiographies, as well as boogeymen. This book tells the story of fracking and how it rose from a minor oil-field tool to a world-changing technology. It is also an attempt, amid the tumult, to dispel some fictions that have risen to accepted “fact.”

The Farm isn’t part of my world anymore. When I hit my teenage years, spending a weekend with my parents and older sister had become excruciatingly boring. Completing thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles in a house without a television didn’t cut it.

As I was stumbling toward adulthood, in the 1980s, two men in faraway Texas and Oklahoma were going through their own changes. In time, they would help propel shale rocks from obscurity into the topic of boardroom presentations in the highest echelons of American capitalism. George Mitchell was a most unusual Texas oilman: liberal and an early convert to sustainable development. He created the Woodlands, north of Houston, to showcase that building a new community didn’t require bulldozing all the trees. At the same time, the eponymous Mitchell Energy & Development was one of the largest oil and gas companies in Houston, the world’s energy capital. Its most important holding was a gas field around Fort Worth.

Mitchell geologists noticed that every time their wells passed through shale rock in search of conventional pockets of oil and gas, instruments registered a significant gas presence. There was fossil fuel in the rocks, but it was as inaccessible as the sword in the stone from Arthurian legend. Mitchell’s long wells could reach the gas, but the company’s engineers had neither the tools nor the knowledge to get it out. Open up a textbook from that era and look up how to drill a well into shale and, if it mentioned the rocks at all, its advice was to look elsewhere. But in 1982 Mitchell Energy drilled the C. W. Slay #1 well to target the gas trapped inside the Barnett Shale, a thick geological formation that covers five thousand square miles, fanning out from Dallas to the west and south. Though the company had fracked wells in the past, it had never tried fracking shale rock. It worked, sort of. Gas flowed from the shale. But it was expensive. As a wildcat well, it was underwhelming. But as a science experiment, it showed promise.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the company drilled a couple wells into the Barnett Shale each year. Mitchell’s engineers kept chipping away at this rock, trying to figure out how to force the shale to give up its gas. They pumped in heavy, gelatinous liquids they hoped would muscle their way in. Then, as they were ready to give up, a young engineer came up with a simple and elegant solution to cracking open the rock that would make these shale wells both less expensive and more bountiful. It was a new approach to fracking that used more horsepower and employed water, the Earth’s most abundant liquid. It was the beginning of the revolution. By then, Mitchell was nearly eighty years old. At the time, his children weren’t interested in the oil field, and he wanted to sell his company. But the rest of the industry remained skeptical about his shale wells. Wasn’t this new technique just a ploy by aging management to hype the company and get a buyer to pay top dollar?

When Mitchell was first trying to crack the shale puzzle, a different oilman was starting out. In 1981 Aubrey McClendon returned to his hometown of Oklahoma City after attending Duke University. Oklahoma City was in the midst of an energy boom. Global events led to a doubling and then a tripling of oil prices. He came home to prosperity, Cadillacs, and new skyscrapers. But he wasn’t a geologist or an engineer. He was an aspiring accountant who had graduated from college magna cum laude with a degree in history. He entered the energy industry and soon became a landman. His job was to convince landowners to sign leases to allow rigs to drill for oil and natural gas on their property. In 1982 a global recession led to a swift collapse in crude prices, and the city’s banks reeled from aggressive oil loans. The local Penn Square Bank failed. It was the first of more than one hundred Oklahoma bank failures. Bankruptcy auctioneers replaced those Caddys as the city’s unofficial symbol.

It must have been quite an education, unlike any that McClendon had received at Duke. He witnessed the boom-and-bust nature of oil and gas. He saw the riches available if you could time the rise and fall of volatile commodities correctly, and he also saw how money made all this possible. In time, he would go on to found Chesapeake Energy and become a convert to the potential of shale gas. He would do more than anyone else to promote shale gas. He was part pied piper, part early adopter, and part rapacious capitalist. Those dense rocks that resemble an old-fashioned chalkboard would make him a billionaire, before he nearly lost it all. McClendon would use his energy wealth to advance his energy and political agenda, assemble a world-class wine collection, and uproot the Seattle SuperSonics of the National Basketball Association, bringing his hometown its first professional sports franchise, renamed the Oklahoma City Thunder. More than anyone else, he would usher in an era of energy abundance.

History is full of odd ironies. The birth of shale gas is no exception. An environmentally minded oilman, George Mitchell, pioneered a way of cracking open rocks with water and chemicals that would come to embody one of the greatest environmental fears of the twenty-first century. And a right-wing oilman, Aubrey McClendon, would become an outspoken prophet for an abundant, low-carbon source of energy.

Not long after Chesapeake inquired about leasing the Farm, my father spent a day driving around to visit neighbors and discovered that many had signed leases already. The reality sunk in. Future drilling locations surrounded the Farm. “We believed they would go under our property and get the gas anyway,” he told me later. It is an old fear. At the beginning of his classic novel
Oil!
, Upton Sinclair captured how the industry played on this worry. “Take it from me as an oilman,” the budding tycoon J. Arnold Ross tells a group of neighbors. “There ain’t a-goin’ to be many gushers here at Prospect Hill; the pressure under the ground will soon let up, and it’ll be them that get their wells down first that’ll get the oil.” This race to drill and drain free-flowing reservoirs was how it worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is no longer the case. Still, the fear remains.

My mother called me again. “It is going to happen, and it is going to be obtrusive,” I said. But it wasn’t necessarily all bad, I added. Gas was a low-carbon energy source. By signing the lease, she was contributing to its growth. Until you sign the lease, you have the upper hand, I told her. They want your land. Craft an agreement that gives you a say over where the wells will be drilled to keep them on the periphery of the property, out of sight. It was possible for the industry to coexist with the land. In 2004 I visited Ted Turner’s ranch in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It is a spread so beautiful, it was once considered as a possible national park. Turner allowed gas drilling but wrote a lease that contained stipulations to make sure there was minimal impact. The energy company could bring only so many trucks onto his property at any one time. The wells were camouflaged behind low walls. The company tried four different shades of paint before Turner’s ranch manager settled on one that blended with the ponderosa pines. I suggested that my parents take a similar approach.

The Farm’s owners met in March 2009. “There was the inevitability of change,” my father recalled. “It was coming. All of our neighbors, all of the land around us, had signed. We were really concerned we would get all the negative—the trucks, the noise—and none of the positive stuff: the money.”

My parents and their friends signed the twenty-page lease in October 2009. In January 2011 the Oklahoma City company drilled the Matt 2H well at the cattle-guard gate to the property, fracking it in August. The Farm’s owners had become partners with Aubrey McClendon. Did these left-wingers, now balding and with gray hair, members of the Philadelphia upper middle class, do the right thing? These days, my sons have started going to the Farm every summer with their grandparents. Was the choice to sign the lease going to change the land? Or, by signing the lease and throwing their lot in with fracking, were my parents helping secure a future for their grandchildren filled with low-carbon gas and renewable energy?

There is a story my parents like to tell about the summer of 1973, as they were building the house that has become part of the lore of the land. A truck arrived and unloaded the house on pallets. None of the Philadelphians had any experience with building or hard labor. Three were newly minted lawyers and community organizers. My mother was getting ready to attend medical school. They gamely threw themselves into the job. My father volunteered to handle the wiring. He had taken electric shop in seventh grade, but when a county inspector arrived, he pronounced the wiring out of code. My father had used electrical boxes that were too small. Small bribes were the way to navigate Philadelphia’s bureaucracy, so he figured the Sullivan County inspector wanted a payoff.

As the inspector walked away, my father trotted after him with $50 in his pocket. Rambling, he described how things were done in Philadelphia. The inspector understood the message. “You see those little kids back there?” he said, pointing to a two-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. “If anything happened to those kids because of the wiring, I would never forgive myself.” The inspector was talking about me and my sister. He walked away, the $50 still in my father’s pocket.

The inspector had the right approach. If you are going to build something, make sure it is safe. He refused to sign the papers until the wiring was done right. My father replaced the electric boxes. A few days later, the inspector approved the job. The United States faces a similar challenge. We are tearing down the old energy order and building a new one, but are we doing it responsibly? Is it enough to be passive consumers of energy, turning on lights and turning up the thermostat, and relying on the energy industry to make sure the electrons and gas molecules are there for us? What does it mean to promote ethical energy production, and how can it be done?

After my folks signed the lease on their land, I struggled with a set of nagging questions as I traveled the country, digital recorder and steno pads in my backpack, talking to people in fracking hot spots. Had my parents made the right choice? Had I given them good advice? Was the nation making a horrible mistake, or were these energy executives ushering in a new era of energy that we can all embrace? Or are they extending the lease on life of fossil fuel, energy that is both wonderful and destructive?