The operators had not initially reported the spill, Chesapeake claimed, because it was too small to meet the definition of a “reportable quantity” under state and federal law. And remember, after all, this was 99 percent freshwater. But think about that claim for a second. If it’s true—and who’s to say that it’s not—it’s the kind of thing that might reasonably keep you up at night, if you lived anywhere near Caddo Parish. The 99 percent argument would mean the other 1 percent—the 1 percent that the drillers are not required to disclose to the public—must be pretty freaking toxic if it was enough to kill off seventeen healthy fifteen-hundred-pound beings in a matter of hours, or even minutes, after ingestion. This was decidedly not the “natural and organic” “people-pleasing environment” “eco-friendly” vibe Aubrey McClendon wanted to project with that new green swoosh in the logo.
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Aubrey had to know what was coming in the fall of 2010, when he agreed to sit down with Lesley Stahl for a long segment about fracking on television’s popular investigative news program 60 Minutes. But he was sure he had a story to tell, or sell. These new technologies weren’t perfect. And they were, after all, merely instruments in the hands of fallible human beings. But horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing had made the United States of America the world leader in the production of natural gas, which he still insisted was the cleanest bridge to a renewable energy future. Were we really going to screw that up, just because of a bunch of Nervous Nelly negative press coverage? CEO McClendon came out of the gate with a flourish on the show. “In the last few years, we’ve discovered the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias of oil in the form of natural gas in the United States,” he told Stahl. “Not one, but two.” He used his fingers to do the count, to make sure it registered.
“Wait,” Stahl asked, “we have twice as much natural gas in this country, is what you’re saying, than they have oil in Saudi Arabia?”
“I’m trying to very clearly say exactly that.”
The 60 Minutes report was an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand dance. The fracking boom was creating fabulous wealth. But the gargantuan drill sites, the noise, the tumult, the dangerous chemically laced frackwater, were wreaking havoc on local populations. But the actual fracking was happening miles underground, safely below the aquifers that supply our water. But the industry had already proven itself “cavalier” and “irresponsible.” Just look at the Deepwater Horizon debacle. Drill pads were now right next door to homes and farms. And the industry’s accidents and outright regulatory violations were piling up—into the thousands.
“Part of the fracturing process involves you pouring down some pretty nasty chemicals,” Stahl put it to McClendon. “What happens if they spill all over the place?”
“Okay, let’s define nasty chemicals,” Aubrey countered. “Nasty chemicals are underneath your sink. The reality is, you don’t drink Drano for a reason, but you have Drano in your house. If you want to define them as nasty, go ahead.”
Stahl cut him off. “There are nasty chemicals that affect your liver, that cause cancer, that shut down your system.”
“You don’t want to drink frack fluid,” McClendon answered. “If you take away nothing from this interview…”
Okay, America. Note to self: Do not drink frack fluid. Good advice. Someone tell the cows. And the neighbors.
Stahl ended up giving Aubrey what amounted to the final word. “If you use natural gas, America can establish independence from OPEC and can put Americans back to work,” he said, as always, exceedingly patriotic. “We can lower our carbon emissions, and we can begin to improve the economy as well by not exporting a billion dollars a day of American wealth. The greatest wealth transfer in human history takes place every day. And it doesn’t have to.”
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Interesting side note. At the moment the 60 Minutes segment was airing, toxic wastewater was cascading out of a valve that had been left open on a twenty-one-thousand-gallon storage tank at a drilling site outside a nondescript and out-of-the-way little township in north-central Pennsylvania. The tank—connected by pipe to five other tanks—was owned by ExxonMobil/XTO, which had already earned a place in the top-ten safety violators among drillers in Pennsylvania, averaging near one violation per well. This XTO-owned leaking wastewater, which contained many of the requisite dangerous fracking substances (chloride, bromide, barium, and the always notable strontium, which has a habit of leeching calcium from healthy human bones, making them not healthy at all), was seeping into a freshwater spring and a nearby tributary of Sugar Run Creek. And had been for a while. The tank had been leaking, undiscovered, for a month or more. Thousands of gallons of sick-making liquid, and more to come. Nobody from the company seemed to be paying attention, and no one was making them pay attention, either. At the time, see, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection had only thirty-seven inspectors available to monitor 64,939 active wells. That’s less than one inspector for every 1,750 wells, so there was no telling when somebody would finally notice that one open valve, and shut off the toxic flow.
On September 21, 2011, a construction crane hoisted a pine tree and an American flag high above downtown Oklahoma City. This was a topping-out ceremony, a tradition in the building trades. Hundreds of construction workers and hundreds more onlookers watched as the evergreen ascended 845 feet, up beyond the floors where the crews had already attached the glass skin to the rising fifty-story Devon Energy Center. “This is not just a building for Devon,” the company’s CEO, Larry Nichols, told the construction workers that day. “You are transforming the landscape of a city.” The Devon structure was the tallest building in Oklahoma City by far, 345 feet taller than the runner-up, Chase Tower. Devon’s new tower dwarfed the handsome art deco skyscrapers built in the 1930s, during Oklahoma City’s first big boom, and it dwarfed the brutalist concrete-happy cubes that rose in the postwar oil boom, too. Devon’s sleek new corporate headquarters was thoroughly modern and built in no small part on the foundation of Barnett Shale.
Like Aubrey’s Chesapeake, Devon Energy was crushing it in 2011. Reports of poisoned water, dead cattle, sickened schoolchildren, and earthquake swarms aside, the shale gas revolution was a juggernaut.
Devon still claimed the lion’s share of the gas wells in the Barnett, thank you, George P. Mitchell, and that field was roaring. Production of natural gas there had increased from around 100 million cubic feet per day to more than 3 billion per day. The number of wells had jumped from about three thousand back when Devon acquired Mitchell Energy to more than fourteen thousand. That one field—the Barnett—was producing nearly 10 percent of the nation’s burgeoning natural gas supply; drillers had already sucked more than 10 trillion cubic feet from the ground. But the innovations built to slurp gas out of Barnett Shale turned out to work on shale everywhere; the combination of horizontal drilling and slickwater fracking had unlocked previously trapped fortunes all over the country. Turns out there was plenty of shale gas (and shale oil) to be got in North Dakota and Pennsylvania and New York and West Virginia and Louisiana and Arkansas and right down the road from the Devon Energy Center in Oklahoma, if you were willing to spend the money. And it had seemed worth it to spend the money; the first few years of the twenty-first century saw all-time-high market prices for natural gas.
When the lead dog in the American energy sector, ExxonMobil, abandoned its previous diffidence and finally decided to go all in on gas in the middle of 2011, Wall Street stood and applauded. The day Exxon announced a deal to increase its lease holdings in the Marcellus Shale in New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia to more than 300,000 acres, its stock price popped a full percent, completing a rise of 32 percent in the year since it had acquired the natural gas producer XTO.
More wells were being fracked in the United States than ever before in 2011, and almost six in ten new wells were horizontal. It had been less than
one in ten a decade earlier. America muscled past Russia to become the largest producer of natural gas in the world, and the timing couldn’t have been better. The Wall Street–induced Great Recession had thrown the American economy into free fall, but the fracking-driven energy boom was like an unexpected net appearing underneath a doomed trapeze artist, mid-tragedy. Renewable energy might turn out to be an important legacy for Obama and Biden in the long run…but in the short run, the shale gas revolution was crucial.
In 2011, the energy experts at a respectable nonprofit organization called the Potential Gas Committee positively kvelled over the spectacular domestic natural gas production data. The committee’s experts, backed by research from the Colorado School of Mines, figured there was a total available future supply of 2,170 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under American soil, which would last…well, as long as we wanted it to last. What’s a thousand trillion, anyway? Let alone two of them? Somebody in the Obama administration glommed on to that good-news report and tucked it into drafts of the president’s final State of the Union address before his reelection effort in 2012. “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” Barack Obama told an applauding Congress, Democrats and Republicans. “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
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Safely. That was the issue. “Can [shale gas] be produced safely, while protecting water supplies and the environment?” read a print ad ExxonMobil placed in big-city newspapers and national magazines ahead of all those State of the Union standing ovations. “The answer is yes….Detailed procedures are used to manage air quality and to reuse or responsibly dispose of water. We are continuing to work with the industry to develop best practices for the safe handling of produced water.” Best practices: by this point, a phrase to send a shiver down your spine. Many of the fifteen million Americans who lived within a mile of a fracked well knew up close and personal that sometimes “best” wasn’t even all that good when it came to the industry’s practices. The oceans of hazardous industry-made slickwater, flowback water, and production water weren’t just sloshing in and out of America’s subterranean depths; they were doing real damage to people living on the surface. Folks in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, were just then suffering through another blunder by Aubrey McClendon’s Chesapeake, after an equipment failure during a drilling operation caused about ten thousand gallons of fracking fluid to spew unchecked. At least the Chesapeake team sounded the alarm on this one. Seven nearby families were immediately evacuated from the area as the slickwater seeped into nearby pastureland and a small farm pond and then into a tributary of Towanda Creek, which had been a fine place to fish for trout, right up until that afternoon.
Later tests exposed dangerous levels of contamination in a number of residential water wells. One unfortunate homeowner got a letter from Pennsylvania’s woefully understaffed Department of Environmental Protection, dated June 28, 2011, ten weeks after the spill. “The analytical data collected by the Department reveals that several compounds were found above the Department’s drinking water standards,” it read. “Strontium was found at 14.2 [parts per million] and the EPA health advisory level is 4 ppm.” The DEP recommended the homeowner’s water “be treated prior to consumption.” Prior to consumption…ten weeks earlier, when the spill had happened. Time machine not included.
Seems unlikely that the residents of Bradford County apprehended this latest release of Chesapeake fracking fluid as a rarity or took much solace from ExxonMobil’s national advertising blitz. Especially not given the recent statistics in their own neighborhood, where drillers had rung up an average of three safety violations for every four wells drilled in the previous year.
And how about Chesapeake’s CEO, Aubrey McClendon, was he suitably abashed? He was not. His guys hadn’t even killed any cows this time. Aubrey still insisted fracking, done right, was “100 percent” safe. He still insisted that his drillers properly cased and cemented their wells and properly disposed of flowback water. He still insisted the industry could police itself and trumpeted dire warnings about the effects of adding new safety standards. “Overreaching federal regulations can also be used to simply create roadblocks to development,” he told a friendly writer from Forbes magazine a few months after the Bradford County spill. “More roadblocks to develop natural gas simply mean higher natural gas prices and more imported oil and more coal burned, all of which have very negative impacts on the American people. What is our critics’ plan for addressing those outcomes? The reality is they don’t have a plan. They are just modern day Luddites. In the future, we will simply continue doing what we are doing today, which is constantly improving and perfecting our techniques throughout the industry. By relentlessly pursuing best practices across the industry, we’ll continuously improve all that we do.” Best practices.
Except that the industry did not relentlessly pursue improved “best practices” concerning safety, ever. Even old George Mitchell, who had become known as the Father of Modern Fracking, could see that. Mitchell joined with the former New York mayor and current environmentalist Michael Bloomberg to make a public plea for increased regulation in the summer of 2012. “The rapid expansion of fracking has invited legitimate concerns about its impact on water, air and climate,” Mitchell and Bloomberg wrote. “Concerns that industry has attempted to gloss over.” Privately, according to the New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, Mitchell was less diplomatic. “These damn cowboys will wreck the world in order to get an extra one per cent” of profit, Mitchell told one of his sons-in-law. “You got to sit on ’em.”
Having spent sixty years in the business, Mitchell well understood the chief imperative of the oil and gas industry. There was no great mystery to it: extract valuable parts of the earth from the earth, and sell it for private profit—as much private profit as possible. John D. Rockefeller’s manic insistence on keeping costs at a minimum remains the overriding ethic of modern fossil fuel producers. Which means they care a lot about how efficiently they can get the most product out of the ground but not necessarily about what they leave behind. Dead cows, dead quarter horses, stillborn puppies, and human beings imbibing radioactive effluent or suffering nosebleeds, vomiting, diarrhea, and difficulty seeing, hearing, or breathing may be unhappy outcomes, but they’re not a core issue for the core business. Minimizing damage done to the environment and the local human population has never been a critical variable in the oil and gas equation. Historically speaking, in America as in the rest of the world, it’s proven more cost-effective for oil and gas drillers to grease the political classes with cash and favors in order to persuade them to let producers escape the hard work of minimizing that damage. The submission of government officials has kept the cost of complying with health and safety regulations comfortably low. Very little has been asked of the oil and gas industry, and very little expected. It’s no great wonder that BP’s feckless attempt at controlling and cleaning up the largest oil spill in the history of mankind depended largely on paper towels. Why would it be better prepared? These were “best practices,” according to the industry. The public officials whose job it is to safeguard the general health and welfare of all of us didn’t demand anything more.
Stands to reason, then, that the sudden ubiquity of fracking in the first decade of the twenty-first century occasioned no equivalent leap in safety demands from federal, state, or local governments. And consequently, safety occasioned no great concern on the part of the operators, even as fracking operations and drill sites spread out into communities large and small, all over the country. Heedlessness, like business operations, proved scalable. Drilling teams in DeSoto Parish, Louisiana, sparked an explosion that reportedly caused gas, sand, and frack fluid to shoot a thousand feet in the air, killed one worker on the rig, and required the evacuation o
f everybody within two miles. Operators from North Dakota to Pennsylvania to Texas to Louisiana hired waste disposal flunkies who left spigots open on their trucks and dumped poisonous wastewater onto highways, or tossed radioactive “filter socks” into landfills, Indian reservations, municipal garbage cans, abandoned gas stations, and open ditches alongside state highways or county roads. And why not? Who was going to sit on ’em?
“Best practices” is industry speak that’s meant to imply persistent improvement. But things only improve over time if there’s pressure—and in business, it’s always economic pressure—to actually get better. In the oil and gas business, the only real economic pressure over time has been to increase production and reduce costs. The capacity to clean stuff up when it goes wrong or to stop bad environmental and health consequences downstream has been a more esoteric matter. Just look at the pace of innovation in the industry when it comes to drilling and producing more oil and more gas from ever more dangerous places, compared with its innovation on cleanup. Bottled water, paper towels, stray boom here and there—a 1967 oil and gas environmental disaster looks exactly like a 2019 oil and gas environmental disaster for a reason. The only difference is that now everyone signs more waivers of their rights.
And, honestly, when the industry did do everything right—according to best practices—there were even bigger problems to deal with. Even when everything went right, it went wrong.
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