by Russell Gold
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.
By 1915, the value of protecting the new oil industry from careless operators was clear to California officials. A few sloppy operators could gunk up an entire oil field. To protect the oil reservoir, all wells needed to be cased adequately. The state legislature passed laws to require oil companies to set surface casing to isolate water from oil. The California State Mining Bureau created a division of oil and gas operations “for the purpose of supervising oil-field operations, with special reference to the matter of shutting off water in the oil fields and conserving the state’s oil and gas resources.” Oil companies were assessed a fee to pay for the new division. The rules required that “casing be set and cemented and, after a prescribed interval, be tested in the presence of a representative of the division to prove that all upper waters were definitely excluded.” Failure to do so resulted in a long delay in obtaining a permit to drill.
Royal Dutch Shell was the first in California to organize its subsurface geologists into a new working group. Other companies followed. Names for these new workers varied: exploitation engineer, petroleum production engineer, drilling engineer, and production engineer. Eventually the industry settled on petroleum engineer. Universities started to offer classes to train people to work in the oil fields, figuring out how deep to set the surface casing. Engineers began to study the reservoirs themselves, to determine where to drill wells to get as much oil and gas out of the ground as possible. The University of California at Berkeley and Stanford were among the first schools to offer classes. The new discipline spread to the University of Tulsa, West Virginia University, and the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. The University of Pittsburgh conferred the first petroleum engineering degrees in 1915. Four students initially selected the degree; then one switched over to become a mining engineer. The three remaining recipients are notable because two of them were Chinese. One is listed as coming from what is now called Guangdong Province, and the other from Sichuan Province. The third hailed from New Castle, Pennsylvania.
Several decades later, by the time Texas investigators were looking into Mitchell’s wells near Darwin White’s house, the importance of keeping water separate from oil and gas was well established. State investigators proposed that Mitchell and every other company with a gas well in southern Wise County should add more cement. Mitchell Energy did not like the proposal at all. If there is contamination, its executives responded, the problem was probably some old wells that were leaking. The state had required surface casing down to 300 feet until a few years earlier. If the state wanted aquifers protected down to 450 feet, that wasn’t Mitchell’s problem. It had followed the rules.
Government investigators held their ground. The wells needed cement down to 450 feet. They proposed firing holes in the pipes and squeezing in new cement that would be forced upward, creating a new barrier keeping the gas and water apart. Mitchell Energy executives argued against this suggestion strenuously. The proposal, covering only a small section of the entire Boonsville Bend field, would require remedial cementing of seventy wells. Even if fixing every well went smoothly, it would cost $665,000, they argued. Moreover, at the end of the well’s useful life, Mitchell couldn’t fish out the steel pipe and resell it. Another $560,000 loss. “If the Commission proposal was later expanded to include the entire Boonsville field, Mitchell would be obligated to a loss of several million dollars!” Mitchell officials argued in a written response. “This is too severe when considering that the operators in this field would be penalized for following the very rules set up by the Commission.” Mitchell proposed checking on its wells weekly. If gas was leaking behind the pipes, it would see a buildup of pressure at the surface. The state relented. Mitchell wasn’t required to pay a fine or fix its wells.
Darwin White still lives in the same house. He was unaware there had ever been an investigation by the state. “I thought it went to naught. We didn’t ever pursue it. You can’t tell what is going on underground, and we couldn’t get anyone to investigate it,” he said. He still gets his water from a local public water system. His 1977 letter to the state was the first of many complaints. Other accounts of gassy water wells followed. Eventually a water treatment plant was built on the western edge of the county to provide municipal water from a nearby lake. The system would later be expanded to serve an even larger area. In 1997 a seventy-mile pipeline was built to move lake water to more of Wise County. Mitchell Energy, to settle a lawsuit, paid for most of it.
Mitchell acquired so much acreage in Wise County that for two decades his company kept drilling and growing. But by the 1980s, Mitchell began to wonder how much more gas was left in the Boonsville Bend field—and whether it was enough to fulfill his contractual obligation to deliver one hundred million cubic feet daily of gas into the Chicago-bound pipeline. The giant geological trap he had found was being depleted by thousands of wells. He needed to find more gas to feed into the pipeline. For years this contract had been a godsend. It offered good prices for the gas, keeping Mitchell Energy profitable and comfortable. But the contract was starting to look like a millstone around the company’s neck. Contractually obliged to supply gas for several more years, Mitchell wasn’t clear where that gas would come from. If his company couldn’t f
ind enough gas, it would have to buy the gas itself.
Mitchell Energy began looking at buying some wells and acreage held by other companies in the general vicinity. One possibility was a well drilled by tiny Argonaut Energy. It was 7,700 feet deep, about a thousand feet below the rocks where the natural gas in the area was typically found. As Argonaut had drilled deeper, its drill bits had also traveled backward in time. The geologic trap that Mitchell had discovered in the 1950s was deposited millions of years ago. As Argonaut went farther into the earth, it had penetrated rocks deposited even earlier. Argonaut had found the source rock. Over millions of years, leaking gas had migrated upward until it encountered the geologic trap that had made Mitchell so excited and so rich. Argonaut ran a gas detector. As the drill bit churned through a layer of shale rock, the device’s readout jumped, but no gas flowed out. Argonaut plugged the well as a dry hole. Mitchell’s people, reviewing the data, recognized that a similar 250-foot wedge of shale existed a few dozen miles away in a well it had drilled. It too had registered gas.
In 1978 the federal government set price controls on natural gas. Gas was in short supply, and the government wanted to encourage more exploration. Gas from existing wells received the lowest price. But gas from new wells got a higher price, and gas from wells in “unconventional” reservoirs that required fracking got a much higher price. In 1982 Mitchell Energy applied to the state for designation of a new field that would qualify for the highest prices. The new field was named after a town in Wise County. It was called the Newark East (Barnett Shale) gas field.
In June 1982, at Mitchell’s personal insistence, the company fracked the Barnett Shale for the first time. A few years earlier, a government-funded project had tried a massive water frack in Wise County, right in Mitchell’s backyard. The experiment mixed water and crude oil into a gelled emulsion called a “Super K-Frac.” The pressure had ruptured the piping, leaving a hole about a mile deep. It took a month to locate and cement the hole. “It appears that this technique is probably not economically feasible,” noted a government report on the effort. Mitchell opted to use 1.5 million cubic feet of nitrogen to frack his well. Then in 1983 he tried again with foamed carbon dioxide and water. The result was that the shale flowed at 240,000 cubic feet a day. Considering all the time and expense, it was a terrible well and wasn’t profitable. (A good modern Barnett well can begin flowing at 5 million cubic feet a day.)
