The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

by Russell Gold

  There was one more tool that Flatirons could have tried: Schlumberger’s isolation scanner. This is the superdeluxe tool that BP had ordered, and then skipped, aboard the Deepwater Horizon. Schlumberger introduced this tool in 2006 to improve on older tools that it says suffered from limitations and generated ambiguous results. Flatirons asked Schlumberger about using an isolation scanner, said Jones, the Flatiron executive, but was told none were available in Pennsylvania. To bring one in would quadruple the cost of running it down the well.

  In Pennsylvania, the drilling industry doesn’t want to be forced to use this tool. In January 2011 the state issued a draft of new rules on testing a well’s mechanical integrity. The state reserved the right to require the driller use an isolation scanner. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group that lobbies on behalf of the state’s drillers, requested the draft language be changed. Specifically, it wanted to replace “isolation scanner” with “ultrasonic logging tools.” A month later, these less precise and less expensive ultrasonic logging tools proved inadequate in finding the Flatirons’s well leak.

  “If I had a more precise tool, maybe it would have showed us where there was a minor channel,” said Jones. This might have changed his mind about ordering remedial cement. “Maybe I would have a different opinion if I had other tools available,” he added.

  The well was fracked, after a six-month delay, and the amount of gas leaking to the surface continued to decline. It is too small an amount to even flare off. “It is now down to the amount of gas that is probably equivalent to one cow,” he said. Methane emission from cows, through flatulence and belching, varies based on diet, whether the cow is lactating, and other factors. Scientists have estimated that a cow emits between eight and sixteen cubic feet of methane a day.

  After the magic trick, Gearhart suggests that we adjourn to the nearby McDonald’s for lunch. After eating a small hamburger, Gearhart reaches into his wallet, pulls out a dollar bill, and then counts out 72 cents in change. It’s enough for two vanilla ice-cream cones. He offers to buy one for Cooke’s grandson, if the young man would stand in line to buy them both. He agreed.

  Afterward, we head back to Gearhart’s office for a quick tour of the manufacturing side of his business. He introduces us to various workers soldering circuit boards onto small tools and shows off a machine built to calibrate gyroscopes. He makes a magnetic survey tool called the Geo-Shot. It goes down a newly drilled well and reports on the well’s direction. States require independent verification of the underground reach of a well. Drilling under a neighbor’s property without permission is a century-old problem. It amounts to stealing oil and gas. This practice was dramatized memorably in the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood. After years of holding out, a penniless landowner finally offers to lease some land to the deranged oilman portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis. But the oilman says that he has already drained the land illegally. “I drink your milk shake!” he taunted.

  The Geo-Shot prevents illicit milk shake drinking. Texas has had several scandals involving wells drilled at a slant to steal neighboring oil, and since 1949, the state has required the type of directional survey that Gearhart’s tool produces.

  Making them, Gearhart says, is a good and steady business. At the end of the tour, Cooke takes my elbow and leans in close. “His data is required by regulators,” he says. “Someday, if proof was required that a well will not leak, we could supply that proof. It’s a long way from being required.”

  In the months afterward, the lack of interest or demand by the drilling industry in a better and cheaper cement-leak detection tool created headaches for Cooke and Smiley’s new Well Integrity Technology Company. State regulators couldn’t insist it be used because there were no tools available on the market. Until Cooke and Smiley had a working RDT, they couldn’t find a drilling company to test it out.

  When the tool was finally located in Bakersfield—the one in the attic turned out to have been loaned years earlier and lost—Smiley hoped that Gearhart could refurbish it. This would let them run it down wells to test out if it was better than a conventional cement bond log. But in early 2013, Gearhart informed him that it would cost $150,000 to design and manufacture a prototype for testing. This was a steep price, said Smiley, because margins are pretty tight in this part of the oil-field service market. And Cooke would have to come up with the money for the prototype himself. If the prototype was lost in the test well, a not-infrequent occurrence, he would have to pay more for another.

  Meanwhile, Cooke had thought up a new polymer to be used to frack wells. Compared to standard fracking fluids, it required less water and was biodegradable, so it was more environmentally benign. Promising to lower the cost of fracking a well, this technology had drawn interest from the industry and secured a government research grant.

  The RDT tool was going nowhere. As of this writing, Smiley hopes to find a partner—a drilling or oil-field service company—willing to pay for the prototype and run some tests. But interest has been practically nonexistent.

  “We’re still holding out for some company who is interested in seeing if this works,” Smiley said. “We don’t have enough time to be knocking on everyone’s door.”

  Would a modern RDT improve the industry’s wells? It is possible. As with any invention, it needs a long period of tests and real-world use to determine its usefulness. But Cooke’s experience shows that the industry isn’t clamoring for better tools, and neither are regulators or landowners. At my urging, my father asked Chesapeake what tests it had used on the well at the Farm. His phone calls were bounced between offices and he never got an answer.

  13

  PANDORA’S FRACK

  On December 1, 2012, Dallas opened a new nature and science museum on the edge of downtown. The building is a light gray cube with an irregularly layered concrete façade that looks like stacked rock strata. From a distance, it appears as if a block of earth has risen out of the ground, shed its soil, and dried out. Entering the building, visitors head toward an escalator that carries them up into the ceiling and then through a cutback in a compressed space surrounded by poured cement walls. The path leads to a fifty-four-foot escalator that climbs past a long diagonal bank of windows. Near the top of the cube, the escalator deposits visitors in a sunlit balcony from which the downtown Dallas skyline is visible.

  Rising up, surrounded by cement, a passage through rocks—this passage felt strangely familiar when I visited the museum. A few hours later, it struck me that I had followed the path of a hydrocarbon molecule coming up through the earth, traveling in a man-made opening in the rocks, while hemmed in by concrete. Deposited at the balcony, I had exited the well and entered the modern world with the view of skyscrapers and an eight-lane freeway. Maybe I had too much fracking on the brain. I contacted the architect who designed the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Pritzker Architecture Prize–winner Thom Mayne. An email from Arne Emerson, an associate of the architect, confirmed that the façade was inspired by underground rock layers, but then suggested that the rest of my impression was the product of an active imagination. “Your interpretation,” he wrote, “is one of the best things about experiencing a great piece of architecture—it evokes a response and is also both personal and subjective.”

  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 patriar
ch’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 w
ell 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.