The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters Read Online Free PDF Page A

out to become a wildcatter, enjoying huge success drilling his own wells in the region. Later, he would help bring the Astros baseball team to Houston.
    Smith agreed to take a 25 percent stake in some Mitchell wells, easing financial pressures that had built on the brothers, though adding other kinds of stress they hadn’t counted on.
    “Smith would call up and raise hell about this or that,” Mitchell says, “but he was a good investor.”
    George and Johnny Mitchell began claiming larger ownership stakes in their wells as they drilled in various spots in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. Their company’s name may have referenced oil, but the Mitchells usually hunted for natural gas, the poor stepchild of oil in the energy family. Natural gas is a light hydrocarbon that comes from the compressed remains of plants and animals. It can be converted into liquid form by lowering its temperature, making it a bit more useful, but until the second half of the twentieth century it was generally dismissed as a useless by-product of crude oil, which is more easily stored and transported.
    Oil, by contrast, is composed of heavier hydrocarbons that form as liquids. Its liquid form makes oil ideal for a range of uses, such as powering cars, jet engines, and other forms of transportation. That’s a key reason why oil became more popular than natural gas, which had its own uses, such as cooking and heating some homes.
    At the time, during the early 1950s, natural gas was only selling for about seven cents per thousand cubic feet, a price so low that most large energy companies ignored gas or burned it off as waste if they captured it while drilling for oil. Vast interstate transmission systems hadn’t yet been built to easily ship gas to homes, power plants, or businesses, keeping a lid on demand.
    The Mitchells found they could score profits by keeping their costs low, though, and they bet that the market for gas might grow as the country’s petrochemical industry expanded. Just as important, rivals were busy looking for oil, so the Mitchells faced limited competition.
    “The majors didn’t care about gas, they just wanted oil,” George Mitchell says.
    Johnny Mitchell—good-looking, well dressed, and flamboyant—dealt with the company’s investors as he drove a maroon 1946 Ford around Houston. He sometimes walked around the city in jungle shorts and a safari helmet, according to a news report at the time. Later he would write a wartime potboiler called
The Secret War of Captain Johnny Mitchell: The Lusty Wartime Reminiscences of One of Texas’s Most Colorful Oilmen
. (Much of the book describes Johnny’s wartime sexual conquests in prose that can be a bit awkward. A sample passage: “Iceland wasn’t barren of good-looking girls; in fact, some were extremely beautiful. They wore wool dresses, which were imported from Britain in exchange for fish.”)
    “Johnny was a promoter, he was a positive guy who could really sell a deal,” recalls T. Boone Pickens, who started his own energy investing and drilling career in Texas in the 1950s.
    George Mitchell, tall, balding, and more introspective and intense than his brother, continued to focus on finding and drilling gas wells. Married and already a parent, he lived in a modest home, employees recall. He kept an eye on the company’s expenses, as well as his own, though he sometimes drove an older, pink Cadillac, just as his college professor had anticipated.
    The brothers’ distinct personalities sometimes led to conflict. George, wearing a suit with a torn pocket, once walked into a colleague’s office, interrupting a meeting he was having with Johnny.
    “George, you look like crap,” Johnny told his brother. “Why don’t you buy a new suit and some new clothes?”
    “If you’d pay me some of the money you owe me, I might be able to afford some new clothes,” George shot back.
    One day in 1952, a bookie in Chicago shared a tip with another of George Mitchell’s