Aubrey McClendon, at the end of 2010, looked like the Oklahoma City version of A Man in Full. He was that rare modern figure who inhabited a world that was largely his own creation. The eleven-thousand-square-foot French château-style mansion he built in the premier Oklahoma City neighborhood of Nichols Hills—his estate included a sweeping lawn, conspicuous gardens, a swimming pool, and a lit clay tennis court—was an easy four-minute drive to the fifty-acre campus of Chesapeake Energy. Aubrey had built that too, and was still adding on. On the way to the office, he could pass the Chesapeake-owned site that would soon house a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Whole Foods. High end. High fiber. Aubrey had persuaded the Whole Foods team to locate the largest “natural and organic” supermarket in the state within walking distance of his offices. The new store, according to the local media, was to be constructed in line with Whole Foods’ recent pledge to reduce its energy consumption and carbon emissions by 25 percent. It was green, just like Aubrey McClendon, who gave to the Sierra Club by the millions. “The area around Chesapeake’s distinctive and beautiful campus,” the CEO of Whole Foods explained to reporters in Oklahoma City, “combined with Aubrey’s vision to create an eco-friendly, aesthetically beautiful and people-pleasing environment caught our attention.” The coming of Whole Foods, McClendon boasted, “signifies a major step forward in our vision to create the most vibrant and dynamic urban environment for our employees and neighbors….We are taking the retail, entertainment and business environment to a new level.”
Around the Chesapeake offices, CEO McClendon had a reputation for focus bordering on obsessive. He didn’t just worry over details on where to drill, or where to seek financing, or how to sell the bigger Chesapeake story. He weighed in on the colors of the latest corporate logo. He wanted a green stroke above the company name, to “visibly communicate the company’s commitment to the environment.” Aubrey weighed in on color schemes for company hallways and brochures, the proper spacing between the redbud trees on the Chesapeake campus, the proper snack choices for its cafeterias, the proper use of commas in company press releases. “I make hundreds of decisions every day,” he told his architect. “I’ve gotten pretty good at it. And I think I hit 90 percent of them right.”
This extraordinary batting average was apparently not lost on the Chesapeake board of directors, which had recently approved a generous new five-year contract for the company founder and CEO. His $975,000 base salary was augmented with a number of special perks and incentives. He was not likely to receive the $77 million annual bonus he had pocketed in precrash 2008 anytime soon. But he was doing fine, thank you very much—on his way, with stock options, to a $21 million take in 2010. And that didn’t count the $3 million worth of administrative support services Chesapeake gifted him for the various personal enterprises he was running on the side: real estate, restaurants, wine, catering, investments in oil and gas drilling operations, and, most implausibly, a $200 million hedge fund that operated out of a building on the Chesapeake campus. Whether McClendon took advantage of the teeth whitening or Botox injections available at the company’s health and fitness center was not disclosed in proxy filings.
Another lovely perk was the unlimited travel on Chesapeake-leased jets the board afforded Aubrey, his family, and his friends. Didn’t matter if the travel was for business or just for fun. This kindness, according to the language of his employment contract, was extended to ensure his “safety, security and efficiency,” and Aubrey was obviously serious about his safety, security, and efficiency. As well as his comfort and his general welfare. The flight logs later turned up by some excellent reporting by Reuters showed exactly how Aubrey (and friends) really made the most of it, including about seventy-five personal trips in 2010 alone, all on the company dime. In June, he and his two sons flew a Gulfstream G550 direct from Oklahoma City to Amsterdam, where Aubrey gave a speech at an energy conference, then took a two-week European vacation that ended with a direct flight from Paris to Oklahoma City. There were flights to New York, Mexico, the Cayman Islands. Aubrey hosted five local rowers for a one-day jaunt to San Diego.
The McClendons owned plenty of far-flung vacation homes that required air travel: the $6 million house in Minnesota, on a lake where Aubrey’s mother had summered since she was a little girl; the $10 million house on Lake Michigan, right at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River; the refurbished $20 million estate on eight acres in the priciest enclave in Bermuda, just down the road from Michael Bloomberg, Ross Perot, and Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi. The island estate had a luxurious main house and three extra cottages, all designed and sited, according to Aubrey’s builder, to follow “classic Bermudian architecture using local materials and maximizing the legendary views.” On one happy occasion, a Chesapeake jet flew nine of Mrs. McClendon’s girlfriends to Bermuda to enjoy the sun and sand and those legendary views. Chesapeake, as per Aubrey’s employment contract, footed the entire bill, even though Aubrey did not make the trip.
All in all, life was good for Aubrey McClendon, despite the gathering publicity storm surrounding fracking. A new round of questions and media attention had flared following a measurable seismic event not far from the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, near a Chesapeake drilling site. Quakes had started there just a few weeks after Chesapeake began injecting fracking wastewater at the site, and then mysteriously stopped once Chesapeake shut down the well. Aubrey didn’t see much need to coddle people over the issue, though; the company’s statement on the matter was blunt: “In every state where we operate…we isolate and safely dispose of any saltwater produced during the drilling process.” Never mind that rumbling in the distance.
The typical drilling and well completion process at a Chesapeake shale gas site in Pennsylvania or West Virginia or Louisiana or Texas or right at home in Oklahoma in the first decade of the twenty-first century was the product of those twin technological innovations, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Here’s how it goes: The first crew comes in and prunes, hacks, and bulldozes away all trees and vegetation, then shoves the earth around to make a level spot for the drill pad and all the roadways and draining areas required. Dump trucks haul in thousands of tons of rock and gravel to form the foundation of a drill pad. The rig is then delivered and assembled, and the team drills down through maybe six or eight thousand feet of rock, well below the water table, where the richest shale deposits await.
Then the tip of the drill bit at the bottom of the hole is rotated ninety degrees, give or take, by a powerful armature so that the well bore can be extended through the rock, horizontally, for a mile or more. This gives a single horizontal well a pay zone, which constitutes the area from which oil and gas can be extracted, of more than five thousand feet—a pay zone fifty or a hundred or even five hundred times that of a traditional vertical well. And a driller can choose a number of different vectors on which to extend the well, thus increasing the pay zone even more. Or turn the drill bit to chase the promising rock formations suggested by underground 3-D imaging technologies. For safety, the length of the wellbore is cased with carbon steel pipes and poured cement, all to protect the freshwater aquifers near the surface from contamination. Because nobody wants what goes through those pipes to end up in our drinking water.
Then technicians snake perforating guns down and through the well to a desired location and set off a charge powerful enough to crack open fissures in the very new casing and the very old surrounding rock. The perforating process is followed by the injection of slickwater down through the well bore. This cocktail of water, sand, and chemicals, with a hint of gels, foams, and maybe even bean paste, is mixed and stirred on the surface and then pumped in at pressures of up to nine thousand pounds per square inch, which is about thirty times the force needed to shoot water from a fire hose to the top of a thirty-story building. Powerful enough to crack open more micro-fissures in the tight and stingy shale and loosen up all that previously impossible-to-capture oil and gas. The fin
al steps are repeated over and over (explode and inject, rinse and repeat) along the length of the horizontal portion of the well. The process might take four or five weeks in all, and the cost is about three times that of a traditional vertical well. But once completed, after all the happy new egresses for oil and gas have been hammered and propped open, these wells produce, and for a long while. But then, there’s the water, too.
In the beginning, there is the slickwater, that chemically contaminated cocktail of water-based liquid, which drillers like Chesapeake shoot by the millions of barrels deep into the ground to shake free natural gas deposits. Once the well starts producing the desired hydrocarbons, millions of barrels of water come up too. That’s called flowback water, and it has all the same contaminants as the slickwater, along with additional salt deposits and something called naturally occurring radioactive material, often known by its acronym, I kid you not, NORM. Cheers! At least everyone knows its name. Much of that flowback water is brand new to the surface, having resided deep in the underground rock, undisturbed, for eons. This “produced” water is up to five times more salty than seawater and can contain chemicals, radium-226, radon-222, uranium-238, methane, and crude oil. Some of the flowback is stored in tanks and recycled for subsequent fracking ventures; some is shot through cement-encased well bores deep enough under the earth’s surface so as to make it theoretically impossible to contaminate the aquifers. Some is trucked off to some other disposal site or holding tank.
But this is not an entirely closed system (what is, really?), and the various waters can sometimes get away from the operators. Soil and water tests near fracking sites often turn up an unfortunate amount of dangerous chemicals and radioactive material. And that’s not awesome for a rapidly expanding industrial process, even in the abstract, but the nature of the American oil and gas business has meant that modern fracking operations are often sited uncomfortably near residences and pastureland, increasing the chances for human and animal exposure to any dangerous waters mishandled by drilling operators.
For a study called “Impacts of Gas Drilling on Human and Animal Health,” veterinarian Michelle Bamberger and professor of molecular medicine Robert Oswald documented the experience of two neighboring families just south of Pittsburgh whose homes were surrounded by twenty-five separate drilling sites. What had been visited on them in 2009 and 2010 was truly awful. Both families noted pets dropping dead two or three days after they drank from open puddles in the street. When one family’s purebred boxer gave birth to fifteen pups, the entire litter was born with either complete or partial absence of fur. Seven were stillborn and the eight others were dead within a day. That family’s perfectly healthy American quarter horse suffered “an acute onset of anorexia, malaise, rapid weight loss and mild incoordination.” Within a week, the horse was “unable to rise” and soon had to be put down. “Blood and clinical chemistry parameters indicated acute liver failure due to toxicity,” the scientists would report. “The [family’s] veterinarian suspected heavy metal poisoning.” Unfortunately, nobody performed a toxicology test to find out.
Their neighbors were also suffering from ongoing health issues, issues not confined to the household’s animal population. One teenager in that house (identified in the study as Home B) was in the middle of a long series of bouts of fatigue, sore throats, delirium, and abdominal pains so severe he had to be treated with morphine. Yes, morphine. When the boy’s pediatrician got wind of the early demise of a number of neighborhood quadrupeds, it got him to thinking. He did a toxicology test on the thirteen-year-old, David, and found the cause of the illness to be arsenic poisoning. He “gradually recovered,” Bamberger and Oswald would write in their study, “after losing one year of school.”
Ongoing toxicology screenings and urine tests on both families revealed exposure to the chemical benzene, which was apparently floating around in the air on their properties. The members of both families continued to suffer fatigue, headaches, nosebleeds, rashes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and difficulty smelling and hearing. David, now fourteen, “also had difficulty breathing,” according to the study, “and again had to be taken out of school.” Drilling operations in the area, meanwhile, did not shut down, or even slow. Hey, in the quest for American energy independence, maybe a few of us have to take one for the team—line up your pets, line up your eighth graders.
Tests done in November 2010 on the springs and wells that supplied the two families with water turned up about what you’d expect. Their water was laced with ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, ethanol, butanol, and propanol, otherwise known as a set of chemical additives used in fracking fluids. Turns out there were unexpected rips and tears in the lining of a nearby operator’s aboveground wastewater impoundment, which had allowed all those ugly chemicals to seep into nearby springs and wells and then into human blood systems.
To be fair, nobody—and least of all the drillers—wanted this to happen. Or did it on purpose. And this was the common public excuse offered up for the dozens and hundreds of similar fuckups around that time. To err is human. “If people are involved,” said the king of the frackers, Aubrey McClendon himself, “accidents are going to happen. Planes crash, trucks crash, cars crash. It happens. We will have an incident or two.” Okay, that definitely works for an incident or two. But the sheer volume of extraordinary happenings—one Pennsylvania woman’s well exploded on New Year’s Eve 2008—certainly hinted at the enormity of the industry’s reckless disregard. Ineffectual wastewater impoundment liners allowed flowback water to leak into pastures and ponds. Fracking fluids dripped out of old pipes or poured out of tanks through defective valves. Truck drivers sped off from drill sites without plugging their intake valves, spewing highly poisonous water onto every road they drove down, for miles and miles.
One of the most dramatic and reckless accidents happened at a Chesapeake-owned drilling site in northwest Louisiana’s Caddo Parish. From the beginning, nearby citizens complained about the usual things with regard to Chesapeake’s operations in Caddo Parish: the noise, the floodlights on the drill pads that were often on all through the night, the constant parade of trucks carrying water to and from their well sites.
But then mid-afternoon on April 28, 2009, folks in the southern part of the parish, down by the town of Spring Ridge, noticed cows in serious distress in the pasture about 150 feet from a Chesapeake drill pad. Some of the cattle were already dead; others were described as “foaming at the mouth,” “bleeding from the tongue,” and “bellowing.” They were undoubtedly in agony, so it was a small mercy that they expired quickly. All told, seventeen cows died in a matter of hours. Their only mistake, apparently, had been drinking from water puddles in their own pasture—just as they always had. A few of the local civilians were understandably incensed when they saw what was happening. One called the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the state police, the local sheriff’s office, and Homeland Security.
The guys from Chesapeake and its on-site operator, Schlumberger, meanwhile, were taking it all in stride. They really didn’t know what was happening, they said that day. But they hadn’t done nothing. They called the home office when they first learned the cows were dropping dead and then started collecting surface water samples. They called in the owner of the bovine decedents and suggested maybe he should fence off the offending water puddles so he didn’t lose any more stock. They called in more Chesapeake personnel to “evaluate the situation” and summoned their hired environmental consultant to take more water samples for in-house study. They did not call the sheriff’s office, as they were required by law to do. So they were kind of surprised when the deputies showed up in hazmat suits and took charge of the scene. It was around nine o’clock that night when they finally got around to calling the Department of Environmental Quality’s Hotline service to report a “potential release” of hazardous fluids. Locals didn’t think there was anything “potential” about it. Two claimed to have seen a yello
wish-green substance spewing into the air at the drill site. Kind of smelled like antifreeze. But Louisiana DEQ regional manager, Otis Randle, who was running the test on the nearby groundwater the next day, said he didn’t see yellow or green. “What we ran into today was milky white in color,” he told reporters from the local Shreveport Times. If only someone had turned up with some Pantone color chips.
More than twenty-four hours after the spill, according to The Times, Chesapeake and Schlumberger were still maintaining that they had no evidence of a chemical release at the drill site. “Nobody is owning up to it,” said Randle.
News of the episode in Caddo Parish might have made it up the chain to Chesapeake’s CEO, Aubrey McClendon. He wasn’t hard to reach, even when he was in Bermuda with the corporate jet. But Aubrey kept mum. In fact, it was almost two months before anybody from Chesapeake owned up to a spill. “During a routine well stimulation/formation fracturing operation by Schlumberger for Chesapeake, it was observed that a portion of the mixed ‘frac’ fluids, composed of over 99 percent freshwater, leaked from vessels and/or piping onto the well pad,” a company spokesman wrote in a belated report filed with the State of Louisiana seven weeks after the bovine die-off. The company’s own study of the water and soil in question concluded that after the leak some of Schlumberger’s “products” had probably hopped a ride in recent storm water runoff into the adjacent pasture. Blame it on the rain.
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