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

traces back to an invention in the 1860s by Edward A. L. Roberts, who fought in the Civil War battle of Fredericksburg as a lieutenant colonel for the Union. During the heat of battle, Roberts noticed that when mortar shells fell into a narrow canal, a column of water shot up, sky high. It gave him an idea.
    Until then, drillers had relied on black-powder explosives to coax oil out of stubborn wells, a method that often proved frustrating. John Wilkes Booth and some of his business partners once destroyed their company’s Pennsylvania oil well while using black powder to try to speed the well’s production. Booth eventually gave up on the oil business and grew angry about the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered, Booth shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln.
    After returning home from the war, Roberts developed a torpedo mechanism that lowered explosive nitroglycerine capsules into wells. These capsules managed to direct an explosion sideways, instead of out of the hole. That fractured oil strata around the hole much more effectively than previous attempts. The result: More oil could be extracted.
    Roberts’s invention was embraced by a U.S. oil industry that had begun just a decade earlier, in 1859, with the discovery of petroleum in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Drillers paid Roberts as much as $200 each time they used his torpedo mechanism, plus one-fifteenth of the value of the increased flow of oil they experienced. The fee was so high that a black market quickly emerged involving workers willing to employ Roberts’s torpedo technique using the cover of night. Their secretive, explosive oil drilling under the stars was called “moonlighting,” a term that soon became popular in the American lexicon.
    By the 1930s, men working on rigs experimented with guns and ammunition, as some men are wont to do. An underground machine gun six feet tall became a popular way to open holes in casing and unlock oil. Swiss engineer Henry Mohaupt’s bazooka projectile, invented as part of a secret U.S. Army program, also became a popular way to get oil flowing when it made its way to oil fields in the 1950s. The United States and the Soviet Union actually detonated nuclear devices to try to get oil and gas flowing in tight rock, though it wasn’t a method that caught on, for pretty obvious reasons.
    The former Standard Oil of Indiana (which later became Amoco) had first used high-pressure liquid to break up underground rock formations in Grant County, Kansas, in 1947. Some say the technique may even have been employed a bit earlier.
    In the early 1950s, as George Mitchell focused on the compressed rock in Wise County, Texas, many rivals resisted fracking. It wasn’t because there was any controversy attached to it. At the time it hadn’t really occurred to Mitchell or many others that this activity might have any kind of environmental risks.
    Companies avoided fracking because it was expensive and added time to a drilling project. They preferred the traditional method of looking for hydrocarbons: Drill a well, like a straw into the ground, and try to hit pools of trapped oil or gas capable of flowing to the surface without the “artificial stimulation” of hydraulic fracturing. After decades of low gas prices, companies were struggling to keep costs down, not increase spending on hydraulic fracturing.
    But Mitchell didn’t have much to lose, so he gave fracking a try, hoping to make the Texas fields yield oil or natural gas. Mitchell saw that fracking seemed to do a good job stimulating reservoirs that needed a little help to get going, a bit like giving the back of an old television a little bang. His company’s efforts worked, and by the late 1950s the Wise County field had become their most important source of natural gas.
    George Mitchell wasn’t the nation’s first fracker. Mitchell was mighty early, though. “The majors didn’t bother with fracking, they didn’t want to fool