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

investors, Louis Pulaski, about a natural gas field in north-central Texas, near Fort Worth. The bookie didn’t know much when it came to energy; he usually just took horse bets for Pulaski, the owner of a Houston junkyard. But the out-of-town bookie told Pulaski that he had spoken with contacts in the drilling business and had a hunch that a 3,000-acre spot under the Hughes Ranch in Wise County would be a winner. Figuring the bookie might have a hot tip, Pulaski called George Mitchell right away, urging him to look into the field.
    Mitchell was skeptical, and not just because the tip had come from a horse bookie eight hundred miles away. The acreage the bookie and Pulaski were excited about had already been picked over by locals. It even had acquired a damning nickname among veterans in the business: “The Wildcatters’ Graveyard.”
    “I don’t know, General, that field has been passed around for years,” Mitchell told Pulaski, whom he referred to as “the General” after famed general Casimir Pulaski, the soldier of fortune who saved George Washington’s life in the American Revolutionary War.
    “It doesn’t have much of a chance,” Mitchell told him.
    Pulaski persisted, though, and Mitchell agreed to check the field out. He got some help from a drilling contractor he had met in college, Ellison Miles, as well as another geologist who had studied the region. After some testing, Mitchell turned more enthusiastic and decided to try drilling the area.
    The first well was a winner. So was the next one—and the next seven, too. Mitchell had hit a “stratigraphic trap,” a huge underground reservoir of natural gas. The bookie was on to something after all.
    To take advantage of the find, Mitchell and his company acquired 300,000 acres in the area in just ninety days. They paid three dollars an acre and kept buying land until they and their investors ran out of money. Large oil companies, or “majors,” as they are known in the energy business, dismissed the acreage as worthless because it contained natural gas, not oil. But Mitchell was convinced he could tap profits. Some markets for gas, such as the Chicago region, were seeing growing demand. Natural gas prices were low—less than ten cents per thousand cubic feet, or the equivalent of about seventy cents in 2013’s money—but Mitchell thought they were high enough to make money.
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    T he Mitchell team would drill various rock layers in Wise County, including conglomerate sediment that was considered very “tight,” or compressed. In other words, the pores of these rocks were so mashed together that it was hard to get gas to flow from it. The rock had such low permeability that it provided another reason for major oil companies to avoid the area.
    But George Mitchell was willing to try a relatively new drilling technique he had read about in petroleum-engineering literature that held the possibility of loosening up this compact rock and getting the gas to flow. The technique, a way of “completing” oil and gas wells, or preparing them to produce energy, was called hydraulic fracturing, or “fraccing.” It entailed fracturing the rocks, or breaking them up, by pummeling them with various liquids to free up the gas trapped in those rocks.
    (Years later, hydraulic fracturing became known in the popular media as “fracking,” with a “k” replacing the “c.” From the beginning, industry members detested the word because of its closeness to the common expletive, not to mention a similarity to “fragging,” the act of attacking fellow soldiers. “Fracking” also rhymes with “hacking,” yet another word with a negative connotation. Energy veterans claim that “fracking” was coined by those with a bias against the industry. In truth, the word was first used in the late 1970s in the science fiction series
Battlestar Galactica
as a substitute for the curse word.)
    The idea of violently fracturing rock to extract oil or gas