So, maybe not the most eloquent defender of the industry.
In the middle of all the press hoo-ha, Austin Holland stuck to his knitting. He had plenty to keep him busy. He was doing his research, working with the governor’s new coordinating committee to help the Oklahoma Corporation Commission define safer volume limits on injection wells and better ways to monitor those wells. He was racing to complete a preliminary single map of faults in Oklahoma so both the drillers and the commission could try to make rational siting decisions. This was a killer job, which required Holland and his team to parse, as he remembered it, “sixty different versions of faults in some areas and work out some average aggregate for that area and try and decide, Okay, this is from 3D seismic. It’s better than this fault that was mapped from well tops. So it was a lot of work to take all these different datasets and go through them, acre by acre, on my computer, and clean that up such that it was appropriate for publication.”
He was proud of that early map, just as he was proud that the OCC’s new “traffic-light” system he had helped develop was starting to come on line. The commission lacked the authority to institute any full-on moratorium on oil and gas activity, but it could now at least temporarily shut down operations within a specified distance of where any new seismicity occurred. That was actual progress.
Holland had become, withal, an incredible asset to the state of Oklahoma. Not just for his scientific contributions, but as an increasingly able and soothing explainer—for any audience. He could elucidate the process of “dewatering” and how injecting billions of barrels of ancient, brackish, salty, NORM-carrying, carcinogenic wastewater back into the ground was the safest way to dispose of it. “This is not water that we want pumped out onto the surface of the earth,” he would say. He could describe how the Arbuckle formation, well below the water table, had fantastic permeability and could accept huge volumes of wastewater. But that there were limits, and wastewater could travel and have effect on faults quite far away from the well and over long periods of time. He could explain why operators needed to leave barriers between the Arbuckle and the strata directly below it, the basement. The basement was where most of the seismic activity actually happened. Any injection-well driller who punctured through to the basement had made a mistake. “We know that if you are actually injecting in the basement,” he could explain to oil and gas pros, “you’re much more likely to trigger seismicity.”
After more than five years in Oklahoma, Holland had learned how to talk to the oil and gas crowd. He knew just how to urge them, gently, to be careful about the messes they left behind after the oil and gas was captured—because being careful was good business. “Really one of the things that can be incredibly useful is the same level of reservoir engineering and reservoir modeling that goes into your production environment may be just as warranted as for disposal wells,” he told one group. “And that’s an incredible rethinking. But there are now disposal wells that have been shut down within Oklahoma. So that’s a lost investment. So by spending some investment up front you may help protect the investment of a disposal well and being able to use it within your production environment for the future.”
In the end, his diplomacy, his thoroughgoing patience, and his diligence had won the day. He should have picked up The New York Times on April 22, 2015, and read these words as a triumph: “Abandoning years of official skepticism, Oklahoma’s government on Tuesday embraced a scientific consensus that earthquakes rocking the state are largely caused by the underground disposal of billions of barrels of wastewater from oil and gas wells….In a news release issued Tuesday, [Governor] Fallin called the Geological Survey’s endorsement of that relationship significant, and said the state was dealing with the problem.” The governor had come a long way from “Yeah that was crazy” and parroting Devon Energy talking points.
But by then, Austin Holland was going, going, gone. OU’s spokeswoman Catherine Bishop handed reporters a copy of the letter Holland had written to his colleagues he was leaving behind. “The main reason for the move is to change my family dynamics,” Holland wrote. “I have averaged 80 hours each week for the 5½ years I have been here. I want to change my work-life balance, and this opportunity is a good way to do that.” The state’s great explainer was leaving for a job with the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico, and he offered no further explanation at the time. He kept to himself the real reason he left, which was a dressing-down by Dean Grillot for publishing a peer-reviewed paper in Science titled “Coping with Earthquakes Induced by Fluid Injection.”
Grillot has said he doesn’t “recall” having reprimanded Holland that day, or ever having “put pressure on Dr. Holland to alter his research or conclusions.” But Holland sure recalls getting the drift that his boss was not at all happy that the paper in Science made policy statements and offered policy recommendations. The dean seemed to be fixated on one particular passage, Holland later said: “For purposes of transparency and avoiding public distrust, it is important to put the results of these seismic network operations into the public domain in near real time. Even if a network is owned and operated by industry, regulators must ensure that seismic data are not withheld from the public. Similarly, making injection data—such as daily injection rates, wellhead pressures, depth of injection interval, and properties of the target information—publicly accessible can be invaluable for attaining a better understanding of fluid-induced earthquakes. Open sharing of data can benefit all stakeholders, including industry, by enabling the research needed to develop more effective techniques for reducing the seismic hazard.” Did you say open sharing of data?
That was the offending statement that seems to have occasioned this meeting with the dean at OU—a meeting Holland later described as a “gut check” moment. He knew right then he was done. “I was just disappointed and devastated,” he said. “I had taken the job at the Oklahoma Geological Survey because it was a perfect mix of what I wanted to do. Seismology is a field where you’re studying something that has a direct impact on people’s lives….I’d spent my time, you know, working towards something, and I thought I was in my dream job, and then I couldn’t be a scientist and do what scientists do, and that’s publish with colleagues. That’s the point at which I realized that for my scientific credibility, I had to leave the position I was in.”
* * *
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By the time Holland packed up his U-Haul and headed west for New Mexico, Harold Hamm was in serious damage-control mode. He had even given an exclusive interview to Energywire’s Mike Soraghan, the reporter who had ferreted out the news of Hamm’s telling OU to shut Holland up. Hamm thought Soraghan’s earlier coverage “kind of smacked of undue pressure and inappropriate behavior, and that’s not what we’re all about here at Continental.” He wanted to, you know, set the record straight.
“Hamm says he wasn’t trying to bully Oklahoma’s state seismologist,” Soraghan wrote in the first paragraph of his account of the interview. “We were in there because we are involved in fracture stimulation. We’re the most active horizontal driller in Oklahoma,” Hamm said, not exactly taking the question of bullying by the horns. He went on to explain what an “approachable” guy he was and how he always tries “to do the right thing. I don’t try to push anybody around.” (A few days later, Bloomberg would belie that statement by printing the Grillot email about his July 2014 meeting with Hamm: “Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed.”)
Hamm explained in the interview with Soraghan that he included the university president, David Boren—who also sat on Continental’s board of directors—in the Austin Holland meeting because he was a peer (unlike Holland) and an all-around sensitive soul. “One thing about [Boren]: he’s always been very, very concerned about other people’s well-being,” Hamm told Soraghan. “He doesn’t want to see anybody trampled on and he’s not going to do that.”
Boren, for his part, told Energywire that Hamm asked for the meeting because he wanted to hear “any information which might be helpful to producers in adopting best practices that would help any possible connection between drilling and seismic events.” Uh-huh, sure he did.
But Hamm was still insisting Holland’s conclusion about induced seismicity was flat wrong. And by Hamm’s judgment, Holland was just a pawn in a much bigger fight. The War on Fossil Fuels, Hamm explained to Soraghan, was so much bigger than anybody understood, and so much more dangerous. “Hamm believes that the discussion of earthquakes and fracking plays into the hands of an active campaign to demonize the United States’ oil and gas ‘renaissance,’ ” Soraghan wrote. “That renaissance has been made possible by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. He sees the hand of petroleum-dependent Russia in the efforts to disparage it….”
“It all ties back,” said Hamm. Which was nuts, of course. But it wasn’t that much more nuts than the truth.
The appearance of the man standing guard outside the Holiday Inn conference room door, in full snappy Cossack regalia—a fur hat perched nimbly atop his skull and a leather whip attached to his belt—was a pretty strong indication of strange happenings inside. For anyone who stepped through that door on March 22, 2015, and beheld the delegates of the first International Russian Conservative Forum, there was little doubt this conclave was full-on Star Wars bar scene. There was the odd lot of conferees in a mix of epaulet-fringed quasi-military uniforms and bargain-rack mufti; the buzz of new alliances being forged in a stew of suspected intergalactic jealousies, long-ago but unforgotten spites, and very current animosities; and the weird feeling that the Kremlin Death Star was endorsing and promoting all of it. The voices that rose above the din spoke in strident tones of all they knew to be right and good in the world: Western culture and tradition, Christianity, and the superiority of the white race—a race whose honored values faced the threat of extinction. “The West has been polluted by the virus of decadence, of liberalism, of homosexuality, of the destruction of the family,” inveighed a delegate from a right-wing group in Scotland. Kris Roman, the lead delegate from Belgium, agreed. “Soon in the West it will be possible to marry a dog or a penguin,” he said. “Children under five are taught how to play with themselves, and children over five are told that being gay is normal.”
BuzzFeed News’s Max Seddon reported that the delegates “railed, variously, against Freemasons; the corrupting influence of Hollywood; ‘Nazi fascists in the EU’; a ‘global cabal’ of ‘bloodsucking oligarchs’; non-white immigrants practicing ‘alien traditions’; ‘fags and dykes’ and ‘Zionist puppet filth.’ ” For all the apparent thrill of being able to say what they really felt, among friends, without fear of sanction—thank you, Cossack-suited guard, thank you, Kremlin-endorsed “free speech”—there was a sense of disappointment about the final attendance. Europe’s bigger and better-financed right-wing nationalist political parties had ditched the conference. Apparently, the leading fascists in Europe didn’t care to be associated with the self-declared neo-Nazis, and vice versa. Marine Le Pen, for instance, was happy to take big loans from a Russian bank to help finance the National Front in France, but she didn’t want to be seen as too closely allied with this particular element right now, not with a national election on the horizon. The leading far-right nationalist parties in Austria, Hungary, and Serbia all begged off, too. Even the leader of the party that organized the conference, Russia’s Rodina (Motherland) party, scuttled out of town at the last minute on what he claimed was important but unspecified business.
The folks who did show up at this multinational mind-meld didn’t lack for ardor. The air in their conference room hung heavy with a desperate need to belong to…something. “What I’m looking for in Russia,” said the Italian fascist Roberto Fiore, “is deep political and philosophical understanding.” Alas, the community they managed to conjure felt a little thin that icy day in St. Petersburg. A Ukrainian academic who specializes in the rise of nationalist political movements in Europe described some of the conference’s highlighted speakers. “Roberto Fiore…has almost forty years of experience of far-right activism,” wrote Anton Shekhovtsov, “but in the most recent general election in Italy his party New Force obtained only 0.26% of the vote.” Greece’s Golden Dawn “has limited impact on Greek politics. The Belgian Kris Roman, whom the organizers proudly described as ‘chairman of the Euro-Russia Research Center’ is most likely the only member of this ‘research center.’ Nick Griffin, former leader of the British National Party who was expelled from this party in the autumn of 2014, represented the British Unity, a virtual party that largely exists on Facebook with four thousand ‘likes.’ ”
The leading delegate from the United States, founding editor of the white supremacist online magazine American Renaissance, surveyed the room from his own spot at the dais and judged it wanting. “It’s a bizarre lineup,” Jared Taylor told BuzzFeed News. “The fringe of the fringe.” This revelation did not dampen Taylor’s hopes for this arid little seedbed of nationalist brotherhood. At least they had enemies to lash out at, together. “We are all united here in our opposition to globalization and in our love of traditional societies,” Taylor told the room. “Tradition is under attack. One way is to replace the people who created traditions with an entirely different people. This is happening in the modern world through immigration….Another way to destroy tradition is to try to undermine the traditions of a people and replace them with alien traditions. So there are two main ways by which tradition is destroyed: by replacing or diluting a people with foreigners, or by persuading a people to accept alien traditions.” Taylor apologized for America’s misguided embrace of “diversity,” which he considered a form of national suicide. “We are all brothers and sisters, members of the same great family of Western Man. But we are a small minority on this planet. Our numbers are shrinking while those of every other group are growing. That is why we must have territories that are exclusively ours, which are for us alone and for our children forever. Without this, everything we love will be washed away.”
One of the few rock stars at the event was a young rebel warrior just off the front lines in Donbas, where, he claimed, he was fighting the evil fascist government in Kyiv, which was out to exterminate all ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. (Even for the delegates, it was a dizzying exercise to keep track of just which fascists they were for and which they were against.) “I’m a nationalist,” said Alexei Milchakov, who promised to return the Donbas to the warm bosom of Mother Russia. “I’m a patriot of my people. Right now in Europe there’s an attempt to blur the lines, to mix everyone up.”
Fellow attendees hurrahed this sentiment and railed against the United States and the EU for unjustly vilifying Vladimir Putin’s ongoing attempts to bring back the pieces of Ukraine that rightfully belonged to the Russian people. Putin’s nemeses in Russia came in for particular scorn at the conference, including Boris Nemtsov, who had been murdered steps from the Kremlin just three weeks earlier. “I know where they live,” the Belgian Kris Roman said of Nemtsov and a number of other also recently deceased Putin critics. “They live in hell.”
Even in absentia, Vladimir Putin, proud native of St. Petersburg, was the hero of the day. Conference literature bannered excerpts from one of his recent speeches. “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan….People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the
world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.”
Here was a true moral leader; this was the consensus of the first-ever International Russian Conservative Forum. “The salvation of my generation is the great Russian people, because Vladimir Putin understands that the rights of the majority should be put before the whims and perversions of the minority,” exclaimed the Scottish delegate, beneath a photoshopped picture of a bare-chested Putin riding a bear. “Obama and America—they’re like females. They’re feminized men. You have been blessed by a man who is a man! And we envy that.”
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