by Russell Gold
I brought up the Mitchell paradox. Given his interest in sustainability, why didn’t Mitchell Energy ever spend money developing renewable energy? “We put a lot of money into gas,” George Mitchell responded. This answer bothered Todd, who had spent the last few years investing in renewables. “But you never put money into solar, geothermal, or wind,” he said. “There are some big Houston families who have gotten interested.” He mentioned the Zilkhas, a prominent Iraqi-Jewish family whose success drilling oil and gas wells in the shallow Gulf of Mexico was legendary. After selling their company for $1 billion in 1998, the family built a large wind business and then sold that to Goldman Sachs in 2005. Next, they invested in biomass, turning wood pellets into electricity. George Mitchell blinked a few times as he chewed some food and then said he wasn’t impressed by renewable energy investments. “It didn’t look very promising costwise,” he said. “Right now it looks like solar has a long way to go.”
He invested years and millions of dollars experimenting with fracturing the Barnett Shale, searching for ways to drive down the cost and make it more efficient. I asked whether he thought a similar stubborn approach to wind or solar might have also resulted in similar results. There was a long silence. George Mitchell sipped his iced tea and then speared a bit of bossa on his fork, bringing it to his mouth to chew. He was not ignoring me or answering my questions with withering silence. The question simply did not engage him.
He stared ahead. The sun was setting. Across the inlet, the sparks and intense light of welding arcs could be seen on one of the semisubmersible rigs. About thirty seconds passed in silence as Mitchell continued chewing. There was no answer coming.
6
ICE DOESN’T FREEZE ANYMORE
On June 11, 1998, Nick Steinsberger woke before dawn. He dressed, got into his car, and headed north from his home in suburban Fort Worth.
He was nervous. There had been layoffs recently at Mitchell Energy, where he worked. The company had hit a rough patch. Mitchell’s moneymaker was finding and selling natural gas in North Texas, but the company was losing money. Its cash was drying up, and Steinsberger worried that his name would be on the list in the next round of layoffs. He was thirty-four years old, with two kids at home, a wife in college, and not much money saved. He drove a 1991 Toyota Camry with nearly two hundred thousand miles on it. The car was infamous in the North Texas natural gas field where he worked. He would pull into well sites and park next to a row of late-model pickup trucks. As a field engineer, he was the boss at the well site. But the foreman and everyone else drove nicer cars. His colleagues often ribbed him about his clunker.
As he drove to the well where he was working that day, the houses thinned out. One mile there would be a subdivision of new homes, the outer reaches of the sprawling Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. The next mile it was fields with cows and bales of hay. Steinsberger was thin and energetic, with long, slender fingers. As a high school student, his fingers had helped him excel on the violin. He even performed a couple of times in an all-state orchestra in Nebraska. But unlike the truck-driving roughnecks and laborers who drilled the wells, his job didn’t require much use of his hands. He designed well completions.
He took over after the well was drilled. These are not the gushers of Hollywood lore. Drilling produces a hole in the ground a mile or two deep. Once the drill bit finishes churning its way through rock, little gas flowed out of the wells he worked on. Steinsberger’s job was to coax, crack, and wheedle the gas out. His tools were highly specialized. There were perforation guns: tubes inserted into the wells with explosive charges that punched holes in the rock faces that had been exposed by the drill bit. Hydrochloric acid could be sent down the well to clean up the debris left behind. And there was cross-linked gel, a heavy, goopy substance that flowed like a liquid but was engineered to have the qualities of a solid. This compound was pumped into a well under high pressure. It would flow through the holes and crack the rocks and carry grains of sand deep into the fractures. After a while, the 200-degree temperature at the bottom of the well would change the gel. The heat broke the polymer chains and made it less viscous. More of a liquid at this point, it could be retrieved from the well. The sand was left behind, propping open the newly created cracks for gas to flow into and then travel up to the surface.
At least, that was the idea. The gel didn’t entirely clear out of the rock. Pumping in barrels and barrels of gel would create cracks in the shale and then plug them up. It was like building a highway with feeder roads but then leaving behind orange cones that blocked off lanes at random intervals and closed down on-ramps. Traffic could only creep along the new road. In a similar vein, some gas would make it through, but most remained at a standstill on the road. (Fifteen years later, the gel used by Marathon Oil in the Bakken was several iterations better than what was available around Fort Worth in the 1990s.)
Steinsberger had suggested a new and revolutionary idea. He wanted to use water instead of gel. And not just a little water, but a massive amount of water—four or five times as much water by volume as the typical slug of gel. It was a particularly audacious idea because he was trying to get gas out of the Barnett Shale, a dense slab of rock that was nothing like the permeable sandstones the oil industry tended to target. If the size of the typical shale pore was a marble, a sandstone’s pores were the size of a lecture hall. The gas was trapped in tiny lockups without space to move around. Shale cored out of a well looks more like a piece of black plastic than rock.
As Steinsberger drove to the S. H. Griffin #4 well that morning, his new approach to fracturing wells was not going well. The previous year, he had pitched the idea to his bosses at Mitchell Energy headquarters in the Woodlands. He had received permission to use water to fracture three wells, but not without resistance. “A couple of the managers thought I was an idiot for trying,” he said. One told him that he would eat his diploma if the idea worked. How would water break open impenetrable shale?
Over the course of several months, his first three wells had failed. Sand had built up in the wells and clogged up the perforations. Petroleum engineers call this phenomenon a “screen out.” Steinsberger went back to the Woodlands and asked for permission for three more wells. A fourth well in March had also screened out. The S. H. Griffin #4 was his fifth. His bosses’ patience was running out. Using water to crack shale was an outlandish idea. “It is counter to everything you were taught in school,” said Ray Walker, an engineer at another gas company who was friendly with Steinsberger. “It was contrary to everything we had all been taught about fracturing.” Steinsberger knew he was putting his career at risk and worried that more failure would hasten the pink slip he believed was in his future. He wanted to make a name for himself inside Mitchell Energy and had begged his bosses for a chance to try this new way of fracking.
Real-world challenges drew Steinsberger into engineering. His family moved around a lot when he was a child, going where his father landed jobs as a political science professor. He grew up in small towns in Wisconsin, Missouri, and Nebraska. His father remembers that his son wasn’t particularly mechanical, just curious and independent. “He wouldn’t argue or fight with you, just say okay, and then he just did whatever he wanted to do,” said George Steinsberger. His father encouraged Nick and his sister to stay engaged with politics and encouraged them to read. On a summer vacation when Nick was about fourteen, the family drove west across the country. George remembered his son reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and laughing out loud at the satirical novel about bomber pilots.
Young Nick was also drawn to articles about what people built. One article that caught his attention was about the THUMS Project. Named after the five companies involved—Texaco, Humble, Union, Mobil, and Shell—THUMS was a clever solution to a daunting engineering problem. The giant Wilmington oil field underlies Long Beach, California. It is one of the five largest ever discovered in the United States and has been producing oil continuously since 1932. More than two billion barrels o
f oil have been extracted from loose sands that run for miles along the coast, stretching under the city and into the harbor. As the oil was taken out, concern grew that the weight of the earth above could settle, lowering the city and causing problems with foundations, streets, and pipelines. The oil field’s operators began to pump water into the sands to replace the oil they were taking out. Where once Long Beach floated on a sea of oil, engineering ingenuity substituted a sea of salty water. “I wrote a sixth or seventh grade paper on the THUMS Project,” Steinsberger told me. “I thought that was about the coolest thing in the world.” That set him on the course to become an engineer.
By seven o’clock on that June day, the sun was rising as Steinsberger drove up Tim Donald Road to the well. On one side of the road was a row of double-wide prefab houses. On the other side was an open field of scraggly brush. When he pulled off the road onto a dirt pad, the engineering muscle assembled there was a sight. There were twenty water tanks, each the size of an eighteen-wheeler, and more than a dozen pump trucks with the powerful engines to force the water into the rock. There were a couple trucks that supplied chemicals to be mixed into the water. Among the chemicals was a friction reducer to make the water more slippery, as well as a biocide to kill any organisms that were stowaways on the nearly two-mile journey from the surface to the end of the well. There were trucks filled with sand and blenders to mix together the watery cocktail. All in all, about forty people were at the well. The assembled workers knew that this frack job was different. Even if they hadn’t been briefed on Steinsberger’s water idea, there were twice as many water trucks and pumps as there were on a typical job. The final vehicle on the scene was Steinsberger’s beat-up Camry.
He got out and talked to Mitchell Energy’s foreman to make sure the preparations had gone smoothly. Steinsberger walked around the well pad, checking the connections of the aluminum irrigation pipes that crisscrossed the ground. Then he went into the command center, a trailer rigged with computers and monitors. He went over how he wanted the job to proceed one last time and then gave his assent. “Let’s go,” he said.
Workers in the trailer began firing up engines. The first of more than one million gallons of water flowed deep into the earth. It was enough to cover the drilling pad up to Steinsberger’s chest. Inside the trailer, Steinsberger watched the pressure gauges. As the well filled, pressure rose and then dipped. Fractures were being created. Water was forcing its way into the shale. As the shale cracked and water rushed in, the pressure was dropping and then building up again. After an hour, he gave the order to gradually add sand to the mixture. He had waited to prevent yet another screen out.
It is flat in this part of North Texas. In 1929 Clyde Barrow—who later paired with Bonnie Parker—and his brother had robbed a bank in nearby Denton. When they couldn’t open a small safe, they carried it outside and loaded it into the getaway car. They were spotted by police, and one of their accomplices was shot and arrested. Later, Bonnie and Clyde may have also tried to rob the bank in Ponder, two miles away from the S. H. Griffin #4. Local historians say they came away empty-handed. The bank had gone belly up a couple weeks earlier. But they didn’t know what Steinsberger suspected. The real money around here wasn’t in the banks. It was deep underground.
Over the next five hours, Steinsberger watched the water pressure. It would rise and then fall as the cracks elongated or the water broke into existing fractures, filling them up. Maybe that diploma would need to be eaten after all. But he still wasn’t sure if this supersized frack job would work. Cracking the rock was only the first step. What would happen when the water was retrieved? Would gas flow out? And how much? These questions would be answered in the coming days.
In the early afternoon, he drove about forty minutes into Fort Worth to Mitchell Energy’s offices. His first stop was to see Mark Whitley, his supervisor and one of his allies within the company. Whitley’s windows looked out onto a naval air station. The Mitchell engineers would watch the military test the jets’ airworthiness. The pilots would fly the planes straight up into the air, go into a full stall, and drop before reengaging and darting off to the horizon. Steinsberger appeared in Whitley’s doorway. The young engineer wasn’t prone to bursts of emotion. Whitley had learned he needed to study his face to detect even the slightest glimmer of excitement. “Finally, we got one away,” Steinsberger told his boss. The well had swallowed, in one long gulp, the mixture of water, sand, and chemicals. The slick-water frack had worked.
Over the next few days, Steinsberger and Whitley kept close tabs on the well. It played a cruel joke. The pressure kept dropping as more water came out. Whatever gas was in the well was weighed down by the eight-thousand-foot column of water. The water slowed to almost a trickle as it was pumped into nearby tanks. A couple days passed. Then the water began gurgling as bubbles of gas pushed up through the well. Finally, after about five days, almost all of the water was removed, and gas began to flow. The well was connected to a pipeline and measured. It was a monster well. Gas was screaming out.
A lot of the wells at the time that were fracked using gel would roar to life and then fall off very quickly, sometimes in a week or two. “This one didn’t fall off. If a well made more than 70 million or 80 million cubic feet in the first ninety days, it was an ‘A’ well. This one made 1.3 million cubic feet a day for the first ninety days,” said Steinsberger. “It was the best well we had ever had at that point. After this well, we knew we had turned the corner.”
What Steinsberger accomplished that day was a dividing line for the energy industry and the country. Before the S. H. Griffin, engineers thought shale rocks were too dense to crack open. Gel could do the trick, but it tended to gum up the cracks, leaving no room for even tiny gas molecules to escape. Steinsberger—and most other fellow graduates of Texas and Oklahoma petroleum engineering departments—believed the United States was running out of gas. It had become a giant importer of oil. It was only a matter of time before it became a world-class importer of gas also.
The S. H. Griffin well began to change that thinking. Fifty-two years after Stanolind tested its first hydrafrac, Steinsberger had reinvented it and given birth to the modern frack industry. He had figured out how to force shale to give up its gas. There was now a bounty of energy sitting under American soil. Since this first well, more than a hundred thousand wells have been fracked in the United States. Every single one uses a technique similar to what Steinsberger first tried near Ponder, Texas. The era of the massive slick-water frack had begun. By today’s standards, Steinsberger’s well was small. He used 1.2 million gallons of water. Some modern wells use five times as much. There are other critical differences. Steinsberger’s well went straight down. Most modern shale wells, like those in North Dakota, are “horizontal.” They head straight down and then turn until they run parallel to the surface, traversing through the shale formation for up to two miles. But the breakthrough had been made. Steinsberger demonstrated that water could be used to create fractures in shale. Not only was it cheaper than using gels, it was better.
It didn’t take long for word of the well to filter up to George Mitchell. He called Mark Whitley twice a week and asked the same two questions: “What is new?” and “Have you got your costs down yet?” Whitley told Mitchell about the S. H. Griffin, but tried to keep his boss’s expectations under control. It was only the first well. Good sense dictated waiting for months to see how the well played out. But Mitchell was not particularly patient. “If you tried not to tell George about something, because you thought he would go too far, it wouldn’t go well for you,” said Whitley. Mitchell liked what he heard and told him to keep going.
If a quiet excitement was percolating in Mitchell Energy’s Fort Worth offices, people who lived near the S. H. Griffin had a different reaction. Robert Catron bought a piece of land on Tim Donald Road in early 1998. By the time he purchased a double-wide trailer and had it moved to his property, a ten-story drilling rig had been set up right across the two-lane
road, about three hundred feet from his bedroom. It was drilling the S. H. Griffin well. “I was really disappointed. I had put my money down, and I didn’t want to live across the street from this,” he said years later in an interview. The truck traffic was overwhelming for a couple months. “It was a daily mess.” He didn’t even get the benefit of a nice royalty check. He owned the land, but a previous owner had kept the mineral rights. He had no idea the drilling rig was only the beginning. Several years later, he stood in his front door and counted eighteen wells being drilled. “This is nothing you want to have in your front yard,” he said, “but there’s nothing you can do about it.”
On a drizzly morning in early 2012, I met Steinsberger in Ponder, outside the redbrick bank that, according to lore, Bonnie and Clyde tried to rob. It is now home to a high-end boot maker, but the old wooden cashier cages remain. Steinsberger’s days of driving an old clunker are also over. He pulled up in a Lexus SUV. It was dark gray, the color of shale. I climbed into the passenger seat, and we set off for a brief drive over to the S. H. Griffin. As we neared the well, my map-reading skills failed me, and we made a wrong turn. Within a hundred feet, Steinsberger pulled into the entrance of a different gas well to turn around. He glanced at the sign identifying the well. He remembered it. “Some of these wells are more my kids than my own kids,” he said.
After we started heading in the right direction, confusion set in again. When Steinsberger drilled the S. H. Griffin in 1998, there were no other wells nearby. But as we drove three-quarters of a mile on Tim Donald Road, wells kept popping up. The wells were in clumps, and I had a hard time figuring out how many were in each location. Steinsberger offered to count the transmitters atop each well. Each well had its own transmitter, and they were easy to see. As Steinsberger counted the meters, I tried to keep a running tally.
