The Boom (42 page)

Perhaps, but a lot of people enriched by the recent energy surge gave generously to the museum. A large sign next to the front entrance lists the founding donors. All had oil and gas to thank, to one extent or another, for their wealth. There was a granddaughter of H. L. Hunt, the Texas oil tycoon whose feuding family inspired the television show
Dallas
. Another benefactor was Trevor Rees-Jones, who was drilling conventional wells on land he had leased in and around Fort Worth when the Barnett Shale took him by surprise and made him a billionaire. There was also the former chief executive and chairman of EOG Resources, the second most active driller of wells during the first decade of shale exploration. The final donor, the Perot family, is best known for its computer services company and its patriarch’s presidential run. But benefactor Ross Perot Jr. had also signed a lucrative lease to allow Barnett wells on its industrial park and airport north of Fort Worth—and was prospecting in Kurdistan.

This museum was built by energy riches to celebrate engineering triumphs and the natural world around us, prominently including fossil fuels. It was also an attempt to institutionalize and demystify fracking, all wrapped up in a building that will be around to teach future generations about oil and gas, fuels that, as an exhibit inside the museum states, “radically changed the world.” Amid a number of smart exhibits on geology and technology, there’s a healthy dose of propaganda. Touch a video screen in the Tom Hunt Energy Hall, and a cartoon country-and-western singer launches into an upbeat ditty about the Barnett Shale, accompanied by pictures of jaunty, smiling houses, and dollar signs. The lyrics pair “racket” with “frack it,” and rhyme about the importance of paying attention to details while drilling urban wells in Fort Worth. “Take the time to get it right,” the singer croons. “There’ll be gas tomorrow night.”

The song is catchy, but too saccharine. Its description of knowledgeable, patient landmen who “answer questions so it’s known they’ve got competence and skill” isn’t in sync with reality. As the land run hit full stride in 2007, most landmen were contractors. The more signed leases they amassed, the more they were paid. Competition among landmen was fierce. Speed and results were valued above all else. The song’s sunny mention of smiles “all around”? Some people embraced fracking, while their neighbors viewed the landmen as an invading army.

Even the industry recognized that, at times, it was engaged in a form of ground warfare. At an industry gathering in 2011, an Anadarko Petroleum manager who handled community relations advised the audience to download the US military’s counterinsurgency manual “because we are dealing with an insurgency.” So which is it? An insurgency? Or smiles all around? In my experience, neither one comes close to capturing the complex reality that unfolded as fracking spread across the country.

When it comes to the domestic drilling boom, common ground is elusive. The forces arrayed in favor and against don’t speak the same language. Even the spelling of
frack
is divisive. The November 2008 issue of the
Sylvanian
, a newsletter from the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, ran side-by-side letters to the editor. A geologist wrote in support of “fracing,” while a worried resident called it “fracking.” It was a sign of the brewing linguistic civil war.

The industry has long used
frac
. In 1952 the Stanolind researchers referred to the
hydrafrac treatment
. The industry’s preferred spelling remains without the
k
. Its engineers talk of frac jobs, frac fluid, fracing, and fraccing. Critics of the industry almost always say
frack
. Why would opponents use this alternative spelling? My theory is they were, consciously or not, tapping into an existing negative association. In 1978
frack
appeared as an expletive in the popular science fiction television series
Battlestar Galactica
as a way of allowing writers to sidestep Federal Communications Commission censors. A guide for series writers spelled it
frack
. When the series was resurrected on cable in 2003, the new generation of script writers enthusiastically deployed the word—but spelled it
frak
. They wanted it to be a four-letter word, as in “Frak you,” “I don’t give a frak,” and “You don’t want to frak with me.” By the time the show ended in 2009,
frak
had taken root in geek culture as a swear word and appeared on popular television shows such as
The Office
and
The Big Bang Theory
. Ron Moore, who developed the second iteration of
Battlestar Galactica
, said he had never heard of the oil-field term. Not that it mattered. By the time opponents started referring to hydraulic fracturing as fracking, they were hitching themselves to an expletive. Before long, signs at protests rallies warned the industry, “Don’t Frack with Me.”
¹

From the Dallas museum, I drove thirty minutes northwest to the suburb of Southlake, an affluent community midway between Dallas and Fort Worth that is home to an inordinate number of current and retired professional athletes. Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw lives there. So does current Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. Not surprisingly, the local high school team, the Carroll Dragons, has won four state football championships in the last decade.

I wanted to visit Southlake because it tried to take a stand and keep out the rigs. In 2009 John Terrell was elected mayor on a pledge to “preserve Southlake as a great place to live, work, and play.” His plan went well for a few months until Exxon Mobil applied to drill a gas well. The ensuing fight shredded the city’s self-image as a place of fraternal goodwill and easy access to upscale shopping. “Get the Frack out of Here” signs appeared on well-kept lawns. Two citizens groups emerged: the antidrilling Southlake Taxpayers Against Neighborhood Drilling (STAND) and the pro-drilling Southlake Citizens for Property Rights. The groups sued each other and the city.

Opponents were incensed that gas drilling would be allowed inside the gates. “Everything they’ve done to try to build this city is going down the tubes,” said a protester outside city hall. After a year of acrimony, the anti crowd won a victory when Exxon withdrew its application to drill. Facing the threat of another lawsuit, Mayor Terrell said he had no choice but to allow drilling permits within the city. But the ordinance passed was so stringent as to all but prohibit gas exploration. When I visited, there still had been no drilling. Perhaps the rigs had stayed out due to the new rules or falling gas prices. Maybe Exxon didn’t want to stir up a well-financed and connected hornet’s nest a short drive from its corporate headquarters.

I parked my car near one of the proposed drilling locations, a large gated home on several acres, and went inside a business across the street that cuts marble for custom kitchen countertops. Marshel “JR” Melvin, the operations manager, introduced himself. I asked him why Southlake had managed, so far, to keep fracking at bay. “They got some serious money here,” he said, rubbing his thumb against two fingers in the international gesture of lucre. “If they don’t want something, it ain’t happening.” In fact, he continued, there were neighbors who wanted to see his business depart, since its open shed with large marble-cutting machines didn’t fit the town’s image. People here want to live in a bubble that doesn’t include any industry, he said. They wanted their marble countertops but not to see where the marble was cut and polished. Southlake wanted its large homes and SUVs but not the machinery of energy exploration.

Southlake, as the name suggests, is on the southern side of Grapevine Lake. North of the lake, other towns had taken a different approach, trying to strike a balance that allows drilling but with requirements and conditions. Some of these towns have been working and reworking their rules for a dozen years, longer than anywhere else, revising and improving them along the way.

The town of Bartonville, for instance, has a part-time inspector and requires companies to pay for air and water quality sampling before and after drilling. Three-story noise-dampening walls around drill pads, which look like an installation from the artist Christo, are pretty much compulsory. All work, except drilling, stops between eight at night and seven in the morning. Fracking can’t occur on a weekend or major holiday. The town requires companies to submit testing data to city hall to prove wells have been properly cemented and the well’s integrity is solid. Testing of air and underground water is required before drilling, to establish a baseline, and continues long after the well is complete. Mayor Ron Robertson said he wanted to “hold the fracking company responsible” if something went wrong but also make sure that drilling could take place. “The majority of our citizens are leaseholders,” he said, including Robertson and four of the five city council members. There have been no complaints filed about operations there or violations issued by Texas regulators.

By all accounts, the process is working well for the industry and the town’s 1,400 residents, which include Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil. There are no wells on his property, but there is one less than a mile from his front door. The well was fracked in 2007. Two years later, Exxon bought the company that owned it. Tillerson doesn’t own any mineral rights or benefit from his neighborhood well, according to the company. In this respect, he is similar to Ottis Grimes, the Burkburnett homeowner who sued to stop drilling next to his home. The similarities, of course, end there.

Had Bartonville found the right approach? No set of municipal rules is perfect. One size will not fit all, but residents seemed content. The city keeps changing and updating its rules. It was engaged and willing to learn and, as Mayor Robertson told me, to tighten up loopholes where they appeared. This approach was possible because the town had neither shied away from drilling nor embraced it blindly. The city didn’t want to keep out drilling, he said, but felt it had an obligation to keep an eye on energy exploration and insist the highest standards were met. Fracking means the promise and peril of energy production are coming back to the United States, and Bartonville was ready to play its part.

Fifteen years after Nick Steinsberger stood in his boss’s doorway and declared the world’s first modern frack a success, the future of energy is in some ways brighter than it has been for many years. Fracking has generated an abundance of the energy that society demands and depends on. Wars have been fought over access to energy—simply reducing a fuel subsidy can lead to riots in some parts of the world. We are fossil-fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that’s not realistic. I wouldn’t want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it is best to think of natural gas like methadone. It’s a way for an energy-addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.

On a smaller scale, there are many people lowering their energy usage. They add insulation and double-paned windows to their homes and purchase more efficient heating and air-conditioning systems. Some run their cars on fuel made from leftover vegetable oil or inedible plant material. Installation of residential solar panels is booming as prices drop, allowing people to generate their own electricity on their roofs. The most committed can even install batteries to store excess solar power and use it at night, cutting the wires that connect them to the grid altogether. This declaration of energy independence—or, at least, independence from fossil fuels—is a personal choice. But it is not a choice that the US economy can make today.

Renewable energy advocates point to Germany as an example of what could be. A quarter of the electricity comes from wind turbines, solar panels, and burning biomass—leftover wood chips and the like. Power generation has also been democratized: the majority of the new renewable electricity comes from homeowners, cooperatives, and municipal governments, not traditional power utilities. Germany pledged to reach the goal of 80 percent renewable power by 2050. It sounds great, and it is—to an extent. It will require new technologies (improved batteries for power storage) and billions of dollars to string up new power lines. Meanwhile, companies that use gas, coal, and nuclear fuel are in trouble. “Conventional power generation, quite frankly, as a business unit, is fighting for its economic survival,” said the chief financial officer of RWE, Germany’s second-largest utility. Germany began this transition in 1986, after the catastrophic meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, and implemented a focused federal energy policy in 2000 to eliminate coal and nuclear power. Energy delivery systems are enormous and complex. Changing them takes time, political will, and patience.