The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  At first, nothing happened, and then, in the winter of 1900–01, just as the investors seemed ready to pull the plug, Lucas made one last attempt. On January 10, 1901, using what was then state-of-the-art rotary-bit technology—essentially a big whirling jackhammer—they set off a 150-foot-high gusher that dwarfed anything ever seen in Appalachia. In so doing they not only launched the modern age of oil but made the sandy southwest its epicenter for the next seventy years, creating with it the classic image of the Texas oilman, an icon that has lasted, as it turns out, far longer than the primacy of Texas oil has.

  IN THE MEANTIME, NATURAL GAS languished, and so did the Appalachian Basin. With the invention of electric light, gas ceased to be needed for streetlamps, since electricity could be produced more cheaply using coal as a fuel. Half of America’s electricity continues to be produced using coal. Natural gas was relegated to the background of the American energy picture: a useful fuel for cooking, perhaps for heating a few homes, but not much else. No longer the capital of American energy, the cities of the gas belt—such as Bradford, Pennsylvania, and Port Allegany—began the long, slow slide into rust belt oblivion, a slide that continued throughout the last century when even Quaker State, a company that traded on its Pennsylvania ties, pulled up stakes and headed for the Southwest.

  Appalachia wasn’t completely fallow, of course. There were still some very active gas fields, places like the Big Sandy, a sprawling gas field straddling the West Virginia–Kentucky border that has produced a steady enough supply of gas since the 1920s to fill much of the limited desire for it. But such places were the exception and would remain so for generations.

  At least three times over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of using natural gas as a primary fuel would resurface. Usually these initiatives took place in times of national crisis, and most often they were part of a campaign by the federal government to reduce oil consumption, or at least supplement it. In the 1930s, for example, as the nation was crawling out from under the Great Depression and gearing up for the war to come, the Roosevelt administration freed up some WPA cash to send a small army of geologists and engineers into the hinterlands of western New York and northern Pennsylvania to assess the potential stores of gas in the various subterranean layers of rock. The study was repeated four decades later by the Carter administration, after domestic U.S. oil production had already begun its rapid decline and after the oil shocks of the 1970s showed for the first time how vulnerable the nation had become to foreign markets. It was then that the geologists first turned up on Ellsworth Hill. But when each of those immediate challenges passed, so, too, did the interest in studying the gas, and the findings were relegated to the back shelves of libraries at a few universities. For the most part, and for most of the twentieth century, gas locked in the various Appalachian shales was considered either a nuisance or at best a sideshow to the real energy game. It was too hard to harness, and even if you could, the price it would fetch on the market wasn’t worth the effort.

  From at least the 1930s on, the conventional wisdom was that the shales—there are several layers, the Marcellus being among the deepest and densest of them—were what geologists call source rocks. They were the incubators for gas and oil, and eventually they would be squeezed up into higher and more porous rocks or ooze down a layer into the Oriskany sandstone. The natural gas would infuse the oil, effectively making it more buoyant, and would pressurize it as well, driving it closer to the driller’s borehole. And when the last dregs of the oil were recovered, what gas remained could be stripped of its more liquid components—butane, propane, and pentane, all of which had their uses in everything from cigarette lighters to barbecue grills, devices never dreamed of when Hart was pumping his raw gas to Fredonia. The remaining methane could be piped to market if it was convenient, or it could simply be burned off, or the well could be sealed if shipping seemed to be too much trouble.

  Of all the ancient shales, the Marcellus was, to those early roughnecks chasing oil and occasionally settling for gas, the most unpredictably volatile. Though a few lonely researchers had by the 1930s done a few early studies on the fractures—those fissures in stone that allow the gas to move in the shale—the appreciation of the powerful dynamics that funneled the fuel through the Marcellus was, by modern standards, rudimentary. All that the drillers knew back then was that the gas seemed to collect in pockets. Sometimes they could drill right through the Marcellus with no problem. But on other occasions all hell would break loose.

  APRIL 3, 1940, WAS ONE of those times. Throughout March and into April, a team of roughnecks led by a veteran oil and gas man named Karney Cochran and working for the Empire Gas and Fuel Company was prospecting for gas underneath the old Crandall farm near Wellsville, New York, just across the border from Pennsylvania. It had been unusually cold that spring, so cold that the hydraulic lines that snaked from the drilling platform to the wheezing diesel engine that powered it kept freezing up, so cold that Cochran feared that the hardened steel bits might shatter in the brittle northern Appalachian stone, but he and his men kept hammering away at the ground, figuring that if they could just drill deep enough, into the porous sandstone layer far underground, they might coax the small pool of remaining natural gas to the surface. It wouldn’t be much, Cochran had figured, maybe just enough for the company to earn a few bucks, and he had no reason to doubt that whatever gas was down there would surrender peacefully, floating up in gentle wisps the way it usually did.

  By the last week of March, Cochran and his men had made it to what they believed was the source rock, a layer of shale 4,800 feet down. A few days later, on April 3, they got their first show of gas. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It was getting late, and Cochran and his men were about to call it a day, loading their equipment into their cars, when almost imperceptibly the ground began to shudder. And then a great plume of gas and salt water roiled up into the sky.

  Cochran, a savvy oilman, was not easily rattled, but even he must have been stunned by the sheer explosive power that he and his guys had accidentally unleashed. Cochran herded his men back to the wellhead and frantically mixed up a jelly plug—a combination of cement, petroleum jelly, and cloth—and attempted to stuff it into the borehead. It was impossible. The gas was roaring up at a spectacular rate, hundreds of thousands of cubic feet at a time—later estimates would put it at nearly 2 million cubic feet a day. For more than a mile around, a gaseous, salty cloud descended on everything. Nearby residents grabbed what they could and fled. They didn’t need to be told what might happen. They had all heard the stories of what can happen when gas goes bad; they had all heard of wells and gas plants exploding in violent, murderous fury. They had to get out of there, but they would have had to do it on foot, many of them pushing their cars or pickups for fear that if they tried to start them, an errant spark could ignite an inferno that would vaporize everything and everyone within hundreds of yards. They could watch from a distance if they had the stomach for it, as the noxious cloud descended on their fields and on their homes, settling into their ponds and water wells, and wonder whether everything they owned would at any moment be wiped out.

  For days Cochran and his men battled the blowout, calling in teams of reinforcements, and finally, on Sunday, they managed to plug the wellhead. But that didn’t stop it. The plugs they set quickly blew off. To make things worse, a few dozen yards away, heads on three shallow wells drilled into higher gas deposits popped one after another like Christmas crackers, and they, too, started spewing great plumes of gas. It seemed all the gasmen had done was get the gas mad at them, and now it was on a vengeful tear. Gas started bubbling up through water wells hundreds of feet away from the initial eruption. It started rushing up through cracks in the ground.

  There was no stopping it, it seemed. Eight days after the initial blowout, there was still no end in sight. The Andover News, the local weekly newspaper, led its edition with the screaming headline BIG EMPIRE GASSER STILL RUNNING WILD, and quoted baff
led crewmembers who could only marvel that “the well was still holding up approximately the same pressure as when it first blew last Wednesday night.”

  They had no way of knowing back then what was going on underground. It would take decades before geologists would surmise that Cochran and his men had unwittingly stumbled across a naturally fractured chunk of the then still unexplored Marcellus, a chunk containing 60 million cubic feet of highly pressurized gas just waiting for some unwitting roughneck to turn it loose. The gush of gas continued for three long weeks before enough of its 60 million cubic feet of fury was spent that it could be finally tamped back down into the ground.

  The worst was over. But for a year afterward, the residue of that noxious cloud clung to everything. Even the maple syrup harvested from the sugar trees at Earl Green’s place that spring and the next fall tasted of salt and gas.

  In time, of course, the eruption was forgotten. After a few weeks, its rage spent, the gas again became compliant, yielding more or less willingly to Cochran and the other drillers, floating obediently, if not serenely, to market when it was bidden, and in the months and years that followed, neither Cochran nor any of the men who had been there wasted much breath talking about the Crandall Farm blowout. As far as they were concerned, it was just one of those things that sometimes happen in the gas field.

  That was an understandable attitude. As much as that incident near Wellsville might have looked like the end of the world, it wasn’t. After all, unlike other gas field mishaps, no one had been killed. No one had even been injured. In fact, it wasn’t even the only blowout ever to have occurred. Up and down the spine of the Alleghenies, from New York state to the West Virginia state line, dozens of hapless drillers who accidentally pierced the unpredictable shale had similar, if less spectacular, experiences over the years. As early as the 1920s, blowouts of a couple of hundred thousand cubic feet had been reported in the southwestern part of Pennsylvania; by the 1950s, there had been several such incidents in that region. These were hardly the sort of resources that they could reliably exploit, certainly not with the technology they had at the time.

  And so, because natural gas was a sideshow—oil and coal were the real treasures—and shale gas, intriguing it might have been, was beyond current ability to safely and effectively develop, the Wellsville blowout was largely forgotten.

  As the decades passed, the technology would improve to the point where it was possible to harness the power of the dense shales like the Marcellus, but even in the 1970s and beyond, the grim science of economics didn’t permit it. There was, it was assumed, plenty of energy in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or even in the Gulf of Mexico, where, as America would learn in 2010, blowouts were also a threat, but that was then believed to be more easily and cheaply gotten. And so the Marcellus was largely forgotten.

  EVEN BY THE BEGINNING of the second half of the last century, there were still a few cockeyed optimists left, guys who continued to insist that the Appalachian energy fields were still vital, still worth exploring, that somewhere down there an as-yet-undiscovered pool of gas or oil still waited, a field that would prove big enough and cheap enough to extract that would thrust Appalachia back into the energy limelight and revitalize its fading towns and cities. But by the late 1980s, all but the most steadfast—or delusional—among them had given up. There were still a few strippers pulling a week’s wages out of dying wells, a few mom-and-pop drillers who, largely because they didn’t know how to do anything else, still sank shallow wells that could sip a bit of the lingering gas or oil. But beyond that, the industry in Pennsylvania was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

  There was no way to know it at the time, but the grim calculus that had made the death of the Appalachian fields appear a certainty was already changing. After enduring a series of energy crises, Americans by the early 1990s had realized that foreign oil truly had us in a stranglehold, and no matter how much we drilled for oil, relief at the pump would be years, maybe decades, away, and even then, real relief would come only if and when we could develop and deliver a reliable alternative to oil. The much-touted promise of a “clean coal” alternative, if it could ever be developed, was also far beyond the horizon. Wind and solar and biofuels and other renewable and environmentally safer alternatives were still in their infancy. Decades earlier, the Carter administration had stressed the need to develop cleaner-burning and presumably abundant natural gas as an energy source, but neither that administration nor subsequent ones thought that it made financial sense to spend much time seeking gas from unconventional sources such as shales. In fact, so little attention was paid to such unconventional sources that by the turn of this century, serious students of energy were warning that the nation might be running out of gas, among them analyst Julian Darley. In his 2004 book, High Noon for Natural Gas, Darley warned that even if the nation could shed its reliance on foreign oil, it would still face an energy apocalypse if it opted to stake its future on ever-dwindling supplies of natural gas.

  Though the nation still had vast reserves of gas—almost 1,300 trillion cubic feet of the stuff was the number most commonly bandied about by analysts at the beginning of the century—most of it was trapped in tight sands or locked inside solid rock like the Marcellus Shale, buried more than a mile down. Experts believed that we still didn’t have the technology to release it, at least not in a way that would make enough money for the gas companies to be worth their while. And so, within ten years, analysts warned, we would have to go, hat in hand, to the Russians and the countries of the Middle East to buy natural gas from them.

  But the history of oil and gas exploration in America is filled with stories of desperate men making Hail Mary passes to the astonishment of everyone, including themselves, and what those experts didn’t know was that in a remote Texas gas field, a handful of drillers were already working on a project that would prove them wrong. It happened in the late 1990s, at a poorly producing gas well called the Simms No. 1, in a forgotten corner of a 6,500-foot-deep shale field called the Barnett Play.

  Years earlier, the Texas-based company Mitchell Energy had drilled a well into the organically rich Barnett Shale, but after some initial success, the company now had little to show for its efforts. Engineers had used a state-of-the-art process devised by Halliburton, a kind of hydraulic fracturing first tested, interestingly enough, at a site not very far from the site of Karney Cochran’s Wellsville misadventure. In fact, Cochran, by then an old man, had been invited by Halliburton to witness the initial experiment. It wasn’t the first time anyone had tried fracturing rocks to free the petroleum products inside, though the previous attempts were, to put it gently, rather ill-advised. Like the time in 1857 in Fredonia when one of Hart’s family members had tried to use yet another Chinese invention—a barrel load of gunpowder—to shatter the rock at the bottom of one of Hart’s early wells. That experiment produced mixed results.

  Halliburton’s experiment, however, was an unqualified success. Under the original protocols developed for hydraulic fracturing, drillers pumped large amounts of highly compressed nitrogen foam (later replaced by a progression of costly gels) into the well bores in an attempt to shatter the shale and send the gas wafting to the wellhead. It worked on the principle that once the foam found its way into a weak spot in the rock, it would expand under enormous pressure until the rocks gave way, and then the pressure of the foam would help propel the freed gas or oil to the surface.

  The technology was impressive. But it was also expensive. And as drillers discovered from time to time, it didn’t always work. There were times when the foam didn’t expand the way it was supposed to, and sometimes it just lacked the oomph to break the buried shale open. The Simms No. 1 well was one of those places where the technology hadn’t worked. After being sent down more than seven thousand feet into the ground, the foam just sat there. That came as a real disappointment to George Mitchell, the president of Mitchell Energy. A wildcatter by profession and temperament, Mitchell had been one of the earl
y pioneers in the world of unconventional gas deposits, and as early as the 1980s, he had been pushing for greater exploration in deep shales.

  After a decade of disappointments, however, the company hadn’t come up with much to show for its efforts. And now, at the Simms well, the two Mitchell men in charge of the project, engineer Mark Whitley and geologist Dan Steward, were just about ready to throw in the towel—Mitchell Energy’s board of directors certainly was—when in a last-ditch effort they decided to replace the expensive gel they were using with water.

  This method had been tried—by accident—a short time earlier. A French engineer working for another small Texas-based drilling company had accidentally flipped the wrong switch while fracturing a well and flooded it with a quarter of a million gallons of water. In a full-fledged Gallic panic, the French engineer called his supervisor, who essentially told him to relax, shut up, “and … see what happens.” What happened was that the well didn’t drown, and it produced about as much as it would have if the accident had never happened. Word got around about the mishap, and Whitley and Steward decided to see if they could turn that accident to their advantage.

  They made a few changes. They treated the water with a few chemicals and compounds to reduce friction, kill off any microscopic biological pests that might be transported into the gas wells and contaminate the gas, and keep the water viscous enough to carry a load of sand—a fine mesh of perfectly spherical silicate pellets, actually—that would be used to prop the fractures open and keep the gas flowing after the water was forced through. Apparently, it took some convincing to get Mitchell Energy’s board to go along with what the board members figured was a harebrained scheme to salvage a failing effort.