Hamm and his medical researchers might not ever beat the disease—he understood that—but write a check that size and not only do you generate a whole lot of goodwill but you control the story. Oklahomans should never forget: Harold Hamm had their best interests at heart.
Other menaces to the well-being of his fellow Oklahomans didn’t give themselves over to simple check-writing solutions. These stories were much more difficult to control. Stories where other people might have something to say—in opposition. That’s why it had required real time and effort and money to get Oklahoma’s unpopular horizontal drilling oil and gas tax break extended into eternity. But Hamm had made it happen; that law was on the books by the fall of 2014. And now the whole man-made (read oil- and gas-made) earthquake problem threatened to tar the entire industry. This story line was shaping up as complicated and insidious, and Hamm had seen it coming. This unsubstantiated (by his lights) charge had been a thorn in his side for at least three years.
The issue first caught his interest when that damned scientist Austin Holland published a scientific paper in 2011, less than six months after Hamm’s $20 million diabetes donation, suggesting that a series of mini-quakes around Elmore City might not be the “normal naturally occurring” event everyone suspected. The state’s new and clearly more energetic seismologist had made a study of the data and found there was likely a correlation between the swarm of seismicity near Elmore City and the onset of fracking at a nearby well. “Our analysis showed that shortly after hydraulic fracturing began, small earthquakes started occurring, and more than 50 were identified, of which 43 were large enough to be located.”
Holland’s boss Larry Grillot, who was dean of the University of Oklahoma’s Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, had forwarded Holland’s findings to the big Oklahoma City oil companies and the head of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association as soon as he saw it. Grillot had been a longtime executive at Phillips Petroleum, and he figured the major frackers would want a heads-up. Oil companies like to get ahead of any potential public relations problem. The president of the OIPA immediately told Grillot it might be a good idea for the two of them to sit down with Austin Holland and, you know, explain things. Oh, and by the way, he told Grillot, one of his board members, Harold Hamm, was already setting a meeting with OU’s president, David Boren, who also just happened to sit on the board of Hamm’s company, Continental Resources. “I guess I’ll just wait for my marching orders,” Dean Grillot responded, “and it looks like this is starting to fall into the category of ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’ ”
Hamm, it turns out, did have marching orders to issue, which went down the chain of command from the university president (Boren) to the dean (Grillot) to Austin Holland’s direct boss, Randy Keller, head of the Oklahoma Geological Survey. As all of that rolled downhill onto him, Holland was encouraged, among other things, to revise his most recent public-facing PowerPoint presentation. His slide on earthquakes was scrubbed of any mention of “disposal,” “recovery,” or “fracturing”—anything that could be traced back to oil and gas. His conclusion that there was scientific evidence of a correlation between hydraulic fracturing and seismic events in Elmore City was diplomatically elided.
Holland really wasn’t looking to pick a fight; he told his bosses he thought the edits from on high might “help [the OIPA] feel better about the presentation.” So Hamm’s intercession to keep the science at bay worked, for a while. The man-made earthquake question in Oklahoma remained a nonissue for the next few years. Which makes this a case study in what happens when a powerful industry thoroughly captures a state government. In theory, an industry’s job is to make money—to serve its customers and provide for its employees and shareholders—while the government’s job is to make sure the industry operates on a level playing field, that companies follow the law and don’t endanger others. When government is no match for the power of the industry, it instead becomes an enabler, an apologist, and often a corrupt participant in the industry running roughshod. There’s a reason why the oil derricks were built first and the state capitol dome was tacked on a while later.
And so, even upon the arrival of the most powerful earthquake in Oklahoma history—a huge 5.7-magnitude quake that hit the little town of Prague—the reputation of oil and gas was protected from any damaging political aftershocks. As Governor Mary Fallin’s communications team considered the wisdom of the governor engaging questions on the quakes at an upcoming conference co-sponsored by the Oklahoma secretary of energy, her communications director wrote to the public relations squad, “Probably actually not a great topic. She could certainly say, ‘yeah that was crazy.’ The problem is, some people are trying to blame hydraulic fracturing (a necessary process for extracting natural gas) for causing earthquakes. This is an energy conference heralding natural gas as the energy source of the future…so you see the awkward position that puts us in. I would rather not have that debate.”
But the beauty of being in the Fallin administration was that an awkward position like that was very easy to resolve; it took only one quick phone call to get everyone on the same page and to get a set of talking points to the governor in case she found herself in the emergency situation of being cornered by a curious (and, God forbid, well-informed) reporter. The helpful talking points missive came from one of the state’s most active frackers—Devon Energy. “There is no current evidence that oil & gas operations had anything to do with the recent large earthquakes,” read Devon’s memo for the governor. “Such events are not uncommon in Oklahoma….According to the OGS, the earthquake characteristics of both intensity and depth essentially rule out man-made causes.” All of which turned out to be somewhere between premature, misleading, and outright bullpucky. But what was she going to do, tell Devon Energy to stuff it? Unimaginable. At least for that state at that time.
It should be noted, though, that Oklahoma’s strategy wasn’t the only way to approach this unusual new problem. Around the same time, the state of Ohio had also seen an uptick in earthquakes believed to be induced by industry. Rather than calling up the oil companies to give the governor talking points to deny it was happening, Ohio sent a very clear message to the fracking and dewatering pros by shutting down a disposal well near an active fault. We “won’t hesitate to stop operation of disposal sites if we have concerns,” said the director of Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources. “And while our research doesn’t point to a clear and direct correlation to drilling at this site and seismic activity, we will never gamble when safety is a factor.” Oklahoma’s state government, unsurprisingly, was more willing to roll the dice.
Which meant Austin Holland and the OGS were the flies in the petroleum-based ointment. Holland again irked the industry by going to a conference in Florida in January 2013 and pointing at large-volume injection wells as a possible trigger for the big Prague earthquake. One of Holland’s colleagues at OU, the geophysicist Katie Keranen, was even more direct. “There’s a compelling link between the zone of injection and the seismicity,” she had been saying. And in March 2013 she backed up that statement with detailed evidence, in a peer-reviewed paper, using the readings from the Prague aftershocks to, literally, find fault. “If the geologists are right,” noted Columbia University’s Earth Institute, “it would mean that fault lines are far more sensitive to human activity than previously thought.” Oklahoma’s government was positively wired to do whatever the oil and gas industry wanted, no matter the cost, no matter the damage. And now here were these perky young scientists—employed by state institutions!—telling not just Oklahomans but the whole country that oil and gas were the bad guys here? And showing their work to prove it? No, not OK. Not OK at all.
Holland was forced to mouth an official OGS rebuttal of Keranen’s paper as soon as it became public. He wrote up a detailed report for his bosses on just where the research stood and then saw it boiled down to a single page, which included statements best und
erstood as either misdirection—“Some researchers have observed that the earthquake activity did not increase over time as injection increased, but rather occurred in a distinct ‘swarm’ more typical of a natural event”—or just total hooey: “The interpretation that best fits current data is that the Prague Earthquake Sequence was the result of natural causes.” As if.
Holland would not soon forget subsequent meetings at the offices of New Dominion, owner and operator of the injection wells in question near the Prague site. New Dominion’s VP of exploration, Jean Antonides, and his crew were on the attack against Keranen for having the gall to publish a peer-reviewed paper based on all the data the OGS and the USGS had gleaned from Prague. “We were told that they were looking at ways to file a lawsuit against her,” Holland said in his 2017 deposition for a civil suit filed against New Dominion. “They just wanted to make things uncomfortable for her, is what they said.” Dr. Keranen found herself another job about fifteen hundred miles away, at Cornell University, and was out of Oklahoma in a few months.
Austin Holland decided to soldier on at OGS because, despite the sound and fury from the industry, he believed the survey itself and its minders at OU were committed to doing good science. And for all the Harold Hamms and the New Dominions and their thug tactics, there were also a number of oil companies in the state that were happy to share data and were willing to exchange ideas in preparation for issuing an updated set of best practices for safe drilling and wastewater injection. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state agency that regulated the oil and gas industry, was actually moving toward stricter rules for permitting. Holland kept telling himself he was making things better. He kept telling himself the fights were all about public relations and nothing to do with the actual science. “We have the academic freedoms necessary for university employees doing research,” he insisted. But he must have been slightly chagrined when Antonides from New Dominion insisted that Holland chase down his asinine pet theory that the earthquakes were caused by the long drought, followed by periods of torrential rains, which filled up the underground aquifers too rapidly. It was bad enough that Antonides was out there flogging his stupid theory about how the heavy rains did it—were long droughts and heavy rains a new variable in Oklahoma?—but he was also disparaging anybody who linked the New Dominion injection wells with the Prague quake. “That’s people watching too many Superman movies,” Antonides told one reporter. “Some individuals pick only the data that serves their purpose.” Antonides also tried a sort of backflip-handspring-triple-twist salesmanship trick when he made the case that the quakes were a good thing! States that didn’t have them are the ones who should worry. To sell this particular idea, he called on a (false) theory that smaller earthquakes diminish the stress on faults and thus avert bigger quakes. “What happens if there had not been that release of energy?” he said. “They’re kind of a savior. They help keep down the big ones.” Sure, sure. That’s a good one. It’s one thing to just threaten and deride people and throw your weight around, but in a scientific battle the scientists were going to have an advantage over the guys talking about quake saviors and Superman and the rain.
By the fall of 2013, the OGS and the U.S. Geological Survey decided it was time to issue a joint statement on what was going on in Oklahoma. The statement, which Holland helped prepare, was hardly a barn burner. It simply announced that the two agencies were “conducting collaborative research quantifying the changes in earthquake rate in the Oklahoma City region, assessing the implications of this swarm for large-earthquake hazard, and evaluating possible links between these earthquakes and wastewater disposal related to oil and gas production activities in the region.” The jump in earthquake rates “do[es] not seem to be due to typical, random fluctuations in natural seismicity rates,” said the USGS’s lead seismologist. “The analysis suggests that a contributing factor to the increase in earthquake triggers may be from activities such as wastewater disposal—a phenomenon known as injection-induced seismicity.”
Tepid as the public pronouncement was, Harold Hamm took it hard. He decided he needed to get serious and start shutting this thing down. He dispatched his senior vice president for exploration, Jack Stark, to meet personally with Austin Holland at the offices of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. Commissioner Patrice Douglas insisted to Holland at that meeting that she wanted to be able to make “data-driven” decisions that protected the safety of Oklahomans while also protecting the demonstrable economic rewards of the state’s shale industry. Stark just wanted the whole thing kept quiet. “They are in denial phase that [induced seismicity] is a possibility,” Holland reported to Dean Grillot and Director Keller after the meeting. Holland later explained that “it was clear that Continental did not want any discussions of induced seismicity in any shape or form.”
For his part, Stark was apparently not satisfied with the outcome of the sit-down with Holland. The public information coordinator at the OGS got what felt to her like a very aggressive call on a Monday afternoon from a woman who said she was affiliated with Continental Resources. It was not clear exactly how she was affiliated, because the woman started barking questions right from the start of the conversation. She wanted to know if the OGS was connected with the U.S. Geological Survey and if OGS employees worked for the state. “She really kept asking about who pays us,” the information officer, Connie G. Smith, reported in an email to Holland, Keller, and Grillot. “She kept asking who we work for and I kept saying ‘We are a state agency and are part of the MCEE [Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy] at OU’ and then she said ‘Do you work for OU?’ and I said we are paid and under the administration of the University of Oklahoma.
“She sounded like a lawyer because she was very brusque and was really grilling me and asking the same things over and over, and I immediately wanted to put my hand on a Bible…or on OGS Bulletin 40 at least!”
Holland emailed a reply to the rattled Smith an hour and a half later, with news that he had received his own grab-the-Bible call that same day: he had been invited to “coffee” with President David Boren and Harold Hamm. It would be a command performance, at the president’s office. Just the three of them. “Gosh. I guess that’s better than having Kool Aid with them,” Smith wrote back, “I guess.”
The meeting with President Boren, who was soon to get his own statue on campus, and Harold Hamm, the richest man in Oklahoma, was, as Holland would later deadpan, “just a little bit intimidating.” Boren assured Holland at the top of the meeting that he had complete academic freedom (which right away was a pretty strong indication that he did not), but he told him that being a part of the OGS meant he had to listen to people within the oil and gas industry, too. So Holland listened, while Hamm filibustered. Harold Hamm presented himself as a man under siege, standing up for an industry under siege, and unfairly so. “[He] expressed to me that I had to be careful of the way in which I say things, that hydraulic fracturing is critical to the state’s economy in Oklahoma, and that me publicly stating that earthquakes can be caused by hydraulic fracturing was—you know, could be misleading and that he was nervous about the war on fossil fuels at the time.” That’s a phrase that stuck with Holland—the War on Fossil Fuels. As if it were a war on America itself. Hamm even talked about the bad rap that coal was getting. But he circled back to fracking, and how maybe Holland had allowed a study on one well in Elmore City to bring him to “the wrong conclusion.”
Holland sat quiet, even though the data and the science were clearly on his side. He didn’t call Hamm’s attention to the raft of recent peer-reviewed scientific literature about the connections between increased seismicity and hydraulic fracturing and, more important, between increased seismicity and wastewater disposal. He didn’t call attention to the fact that his own recent paper on the topic had also been peer-reviewed. Holland had been around long enough to understand the futility of arguing with a successful Oklahoma oilman, especially the most successful Oklaho
ma oilman. “Honestly, it was nothing different than what I’d heard from those in the oil and gas industry since I basically showed up in Oklahoma. So it wasn’t anything new. And I’ve been yelled at before; at least I wasn’t getting yelled at.”
Holland didn’t feel much better after that meeting, but he hadn’t gone in expecting to. Funny thing was, neither did Hamm, who clearly didn’t feel that Holland had entirely taken to heart his concerns. He had doubts about this young scientist’s willingness to Thunder Up for the oil and gas team. Hamm wanted all public comments out of OGS to henceforth come from the office of the university’s longtime (and trusted) spokeswoman. And he was under the impression that Boren had made that happen. “I am glad you put Catherine Bishop in charge,” Hamm wrote to Boren a few weeks after the delightful coffee meeting with Austin Holland. “This situation could spiral out of hand easily.”
What did spiral out of hand soon after was the sheer number of earthquakes in Oklahoma. When the pace of quakes nearly tripled in 2014 from the year before, the USGS and the OGS put out another joint statement, updating their earlier one. “The likelihood of future, damaging earthquakes [in central and north-central Oklahoma] has increased as a result of the increased number of small and moderate shocks.” So much for the idea that the little shakers kept the big ones at bay. “Building owners and government officials should have a special concern for older, unreinforced brick structures, which are vulnerable to serious damage during sufficient shaking,” said Holland’s counterpart at the USGS. National Geographic picked up the story of the growing problem and its by-now-clear association with unconventional drilling. “Underground disposal of wastewater from fracking may pose a much greater risk of causing dangerous earthquakes than previously believed” was the lede. “Worse yet, scientists are not yet able to predict which wastewater injection sites are likely to pose risks to buildings or critical structures such as power plants, and do not yet know what operators might do to mitigate the hazard.”
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