The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  But Mitchell himself backed the boys in the field, though he had grave misgivings about what Whitley and Steward were proposing. Gas drillers spent half their lives trying to figure out better ways to get water out of gas, and here were these guys telling him that he ought to pump millions of gallons of the stuff into one of his wells.

  Still, in early 1997, Mitchell and his board finally decided to take a big chance and try what came to be known as the first slick water frack.

  It worked.

  The law of unintended consequences is a remarkable thing. As it turned out, slick water fracking had unexpected benefits. Unlike foams or gels, water is as compressed as it is ever going to get when it’s pumped into a well, so the slick water was able to deliver a far mightier blow to the buried shale. It was not only cheaper than the foams and gels, it worked better. It took a lot of energy to pump those gels and foams into the earth, and it took a lot of energy for those gels to expand, and every bit of that loss reduced their power inside the rock. Gel fracking’s own physics was a drag on its effectiveness. But with the water, there was virtually no waste of energy; all of it could now be focused and forced directly into the rock itself. The water was an irresistible force and the rock had to yield to it.

  In the lore of the gasmen, Whitley and Steward’s gamble was one of those seminal “git ’er done” moments they like to think define their business, as critical as the moment when Hart decided to break out the shovels to dig a twenty-seven-foot hole in the woods outside Fredonia or when Drake pounded a steel pipe seventy feet into the rocky ground of Titusville in 1859, or that moment in 1901 when Lucas hit his gusher at Spindletop. Within days, the well was churning up hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of natural gas. Within weeks, the process began to spread, and within a year, the Barnett Shale was well on its way to producing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

  Whitley and Steward had changed the rules of the game. Before long, drillers, improving upon their advances, would combine slick water fracturing with the rapidly developing technology of directional drilling—the same technique used in offshore drilling, in which a conventional well is drilled straight down for a few thousand feet before a diamond-hard motorized bit snakes out laterally to access up to a square mile of gas from a single well pad. Together, those techniques would usher in the era of the unconventional shale play.

  Within the space of just a few years, not only had the Barnett Play grown to monstrous proportions—by 2005, the Barnett alone was supplying a full 10 percent of the nation’s natural gas, a development that turned down-at-the-heels drillers into multimillionaires overnight—but so had others across the country.

  Shale plays in Oklahoma and Louisiana and Arkansas that had long been regarded as a sucker’s bet were now the hottest ticket in the country and the destination of choice for landmen and roughnecks and the assorted scam artists and con men who follow them like puppies wherever they go. Places such as Haynesville, Louisiana, a town that in 2003 had a population of 2,561, according to a U.S. Census estimate, and a median income of $20,406—about half that of the nation as a whole—were now being mentioned in the same breath as Saudi Arabia.

  A hundred years earlier, a new technology, the rotary bit drill, had helped end the ascendancy of the Appalachian energy fields. Now a gas boom worth a trillion dollars by some estimates was under way, fueled by yet another new technology. And it wouldn’t be long before the shock waves from that boom would roll through a thousand miles of underground rock and echo in the hills of northern Appalachia, right where it began.

  I DON’T IMAGINE THAT the woman with the nose ring had ever heard of Bill Zagorski. That’s a shame, because, as I found out, he was the one guy who was most directly responsible for her turning up on my mother’s lawn. It started right after the beginning of the new millennium. Bill Zagorski was a geologist, and geologists, perhaps by virtue of the materials they work with, tend to take the long view of things. But even by those standards, if the rest of the new millennium was going to be like the first few months of its first year, it would not be an easy thousand years for Zagorski.

  He was closing in fast on fifty, and in his private moments he was starting to wonder whether his best days, like those of the Appalachian gas and oil fields where he had spent most of his career, were behind him. He was going through a divorce, and while most guys his age might be able to simply bury themselves in their work as an escape, things at Range Resources, the energy company he worked for, had been a little rocky as well. Collapsing energy prices in the late 1990s, along with what Range executives would later describe as a couple of “bone-headed” business decisions, had sent the company’s stock spiraling downward. It had collapsed from a high of nearly $27 a share to the point where, in 1997, you could buy a share of Range Resources for $1.29. As John Pinkerton, Range’s plainspoken Chief Executive Officer, put it not too long ago, “you could have bought the whole company for your loose change.”

  Out in Range’s home state of Texas, the Barnett Play was just starting to heat up, and while Range had some holdings in the area, it was nothing compared to what their competitors, such as Chesapeake and Devon, had, and so the call went out from Range’s corporate headquarters. “Find the next Barnett.”

  By the dawn of 2000, Range’s board of directors had given Pinkerton his marching orders; he had passed them along to the company’s newly installed chief operating officer, Jeffrey Ventura; and Ventura in turn passed them along to Bill Zagorski.

  It was a daunting assignment. Yes, Zagorski was an old Appalachian hand, and he knew about the region’s few successes like the Big Sandy. But he also knew about its failures, many of them the failures of creeping middle age, at least in the geological sense. These were so numerous, in fact, that by 2000, the underground potential of the Appalachian Basin had pretty much been written off by the industry and the nation at large in the same way that all the wheezing coal towns and dying steel towns aboveground had.

  Still, there were a few signs that the place might not be quite done for. Up in New York state, the ten-thousand-foot-deep Trenton Black River formation, a massive deposit that stretches from Nova Scotia to the shores of the Great Lakes, cutting deep beneath the Appalachian Mountains all the way south to Tennessee, had been poked and prodded and was showing promising results. It was deeper than some of the other formations—twice as deep as the part of the Marcellus that Cochran had accidentally pierced, for example—but those early experiments in it had raised hopes that the Trenton Black River formation, naturally fractured, and under enough pressure to keep the gas flowing once it was tapped, might be a good bet.

  The problem was that all those successes had been across the northern border of Pennsylvania, some two hundred miles and a few geological epochs away from the fifty thousand or so acres of leased land in western and central Pennsylvania that Range now controlled.

  The way Zagorski figured it, there were a thousand geological reasons why the successes in New York state might not be repeated in western Pennsylvania. All the same, Zagorski decided to take a stab at it. Because Zagorski hailed from an older generation, a generation that came of age in the days before every piece of data in the world was digitized, he had an affinity for doing things the old-fashioned way. That included studying those old paper records, the same sort of logs that Karney Cochran and the other old-timers dutifully filed decades ago.

  Sitting in his office, poring over those old records, Zagorski stumbled across something interesting. Back in the 1940s, a fair amount of drilling had been done in the area, particularly around a plot of land that Range had leased in western Pennsylvania, a place belonging to a farmer named Renz. There had been several reports of brief but strong showings of gas, most of it coming when the drillers made it a mile or so down. In fact, on several occasions, there had been blowouts. While there was nothing in the records on a par with the Crandall farm blowout, one of them, a mishap at the Kelly-Sutherland well, had been powerful enough to blow several hundred pound
s’ worth of rigging thirty feet up the well bore.

  He drove out to take a look at the site for himself.

  As enamored as he is of the old paper records, Zagorski is no Luddite, and so he ordered up seismic tests and took core samples from the earth. Core samples are like the earth’s totem poles, long, densely layered cylinders of stone the width of a man’s fist, cut into the earth at various depths. Each one contains an exquisitely detailed history of the accidents of eons, and each carries clues to what that rock holds that can be read in its substance and its color—the denser and darker the rock, the more likely it is to contain gas. It is a specific code that can tell a geologist whether the rock is dead or if it still pulses with energy.

  It was the samples taken from the deepest stratum that first caught Zagorksi’s attention. He studied the density and porosity of that stone and ran tests on it. Those tests confirmed that beneath the rock formation where those blowouts had originated, there was a larger and potentially rich stratum the geologists call the Lockport Dolomite, which had, up to that point, received comparatively little attention. It was precisely the kind of porous rock that might be expected to yield gas. Zagorski guessed that those blowouts and gas shows might actually have been produced by the Lockport formation. This was thrilling, because it was far closer to the surface than the Trenton Black River formation, which meant that it should be far more economical to recover.

  By 2003, Range was ready to test Zagorski’s find, and they pulled together that spectacular circus parade that is a drilling operation. They carved out a spot a few acres across on the top of the hill, brought in their rig, and began boring into the earth. It was, in most respects, an old-school operation. There was no need, Zagorski had figured, to employ the state-of-the-art technology that the Mitchell boys had discovered down in Texas. If there was gas in the Lockport, it was there for the taking. Sure enough, it took just a few days to bore through all those other layers, including that layer of shale that had so bedeviled Cochran. At about six thousand feet, they hit their first show of gas, and the engineers and the roughnecks high-fived each other. It came up strong at first, tens of thousands of cubic feet a day, and then faster. And faster. It was rushing up out of the ground at a really good rate. The overpressured rock was producing so much gas that the riggers were having a hard time keeping up with it. But almost as quickly as it had appeared, the gas from the Renz well vanished. Within three days, the gas tapered off to nearly nothing.

  RANGE RESOURCES HAD SPENT millions of dollars, had wasted nearly three years, and had nothing but a dry hole to show for it.

  No one said anything to Zagorski. No one took him to the woodshed. They didn’t have to. Men of a certain age don’t need any help when they’re cataloguing their failures. All of a sudden, Bill Zagorski felt an overpowering urge to get out of town for a while.

  It just so happened that a friend of his from Houston, another veteran of the gas industry, had called Zagorski out of the blue looking for some advice about an exciting shale play he was considering exploring in Texas called the Black Water Basin. The way his friend explained it, the shale there was as rich as anything he had seen in the Barnett, and he invited Zagorski to come out and take a look at the stuff that had been collected as part of the initial exploration so they could brainstorm about the best way to exploit it.

  Desperate for anything that would take his mind off the dismal performance of the Renz well, Zagorski took him up on it. As they sat together going over the data from the Black Water Basin and studying similar reports from the Barnett, Zagorski had the nagging feeling that it all looked terribly familiar. It was when he looked at the core sample of shale drawn from the Black Water Basin that he realized the mistake he had made. The rock he held in his hand was almost identical to the shavings that had come up when his drillers had bored through the shale on the way down to the Lockport Dolomite at the Renz farm.

  He broke off a piece of the shale, and when he did, an invisible wisp of gas, cold, earthy, and intoxicating, wafted out of it; his head got a little lighter, his heart beat a little faster, and then it hit him. The lightbulb went on.

  This was what he had been looking for. The composition of the shale, the history of blowouts, the seemingly random pockets of gas that collected in some places and not in others, all of it was identical to the stuff he had seen back in Pennsylvania and overlooked, identical to the Marcellus Shale, that layer he had drilled right through on his way to the Lockport Dolomite. Suddenly, it all made sense. The old logs hadn’t misled him; he had misunderstood them. The Renz well hadn’t failed him—that was just its way of telling him that he was drilling into the wrong rocks. He should have been drilling into the black shale all along.

  In what can be described as either a supreme act of self-confidence or the thoroughly desperate act of a man who in middle age was watching his last chance for redemption float off with the gas from the Lockport Dolomite, Bill Zagorski hopped on a flight to Pittsburgh and arranged a meeting with his boss, Jeff Ventura. He carried with him one of those core samples from the Renz site that he had initially overlooked. He recounted his visit to the Black Water Basin, described in minute detail the shale he had seen there, and showed Ventura how that shale matched in almost every important aspect the shale that was lying beneath the Renz farm. He barely took a breath as he explained to Ventura precisely what he wanted to do next: he wanted to spend at least another million to drill a vertical well straight down into the Marcellus, and then, using the new technology that the Mitchell boys had discovered, he wanted to frack the hell out of it.

  After silently chewing over Zagorski’s audacious proposal for a few nerve-racking moments, Ventura leaned forward in his chair and said simply: “Let’s put the big slick water frack on it.” The way Ventura figured it, if they were going to do it, they might as well do it big.

  And so, not long after they had trundled away from the Renz farm with their collective tails between their collective legs, the various marchers in the spectacular parade of drillers were on their way back, only this time, there were more of them.

  On an unseasonably warm October day in 2004, they brought out the pride and joy of the gas field, the machine that would make the “big frack” possible. It was a fifty-foot-long, gunship-gray behemoth mounted around a 2,100-horsepower Cummins diesel engine. It had an Allison transmission capable of churning out enough torque to pump slick water more than 6,500 feet straight down at sustained rates of thousands of gallons per minute and at sustained pressures of 9,500 pounds per square inch. And it could do it, without stopping, for up to fifteen days.

  Zagorski couldn’t stand to be there. His career, his reputation, everything was riding on the outcome, but there was nothing more he could do but wait. He spent the next couple of days holed up in his office seventy miles to the west, littering the place with half-drunk cups of office coffee and pacing back and forth in front of his computer, waiting for periodic updates from the project manager at the site. He had no idea how long he would be there. But then, a little less than twenty-four hours after the roughnecks had finished putting the big slick water frack on the Renz well, there was news. And it was stunning. The well spewed back some 40 percent of the fluid, and right behind it came the gas. A lot of gas. The initial estimates put it at more than 300,000 cubic feet per day. It showed no sign of letting up, and while it wasn’t the single richest well in the world, those numbers put it in the big leagues, right up there with the initial returns on the early wells drilled in the Barnett.

  Zagorski and Range had done it. They had found what drillers, in a turn of phrase meant to summon all the Wild West romance of those first gas-and-oil-soaked gamblers, would come to call the next Big Play.

  They didn’t know it at the time, but they had also triggered a kind of earthquake, a tectonic shift that would change everything. It would breathe new life into the old energy fields of Pennsylvania and beyond. The Renz well may have been the epicenter, but the shock waves that would follow th
at discovery were already radiating out, and some of the most powerful of them would soon be felt three hundred miles or so to the northeast, in a forgotten little corner of Appalachia a few miles south of the New York state border, about twenty-five miles north of Scranton—the place that my family called home.

  In fact, a few miles from my mother’s farm, on a hill not far from the old gas station where back in the old days a grim-faced Ken Ely used to let me gas up my Torino even if I didn’t have the money to pay him, those changes were already starting to happen.

  THREE

  One Hill Over

  I never did meet the young woman with the nose ring. Rumor had it that after her bid to woo my mother and her neighbors, she made one or two more circuits around Ellsworth Hill and then vanished. But others from other companies took her place, and as autumn gave way to winter, their numbers started to increase, until as December turned to January, there was a thundering herd of them. You could spot them from a mile away, gathered at the local gas stations to fill up their brand-new GMC and Chevy and Dodge pickups glittering in the winter’s afternoon sun, looking for all the world like a pack of Hemi-powered pachyderms. They’d sit shoulder-to-shoulder at the local lunch counters and diners, and if the fact that they could afford to drive brand-new trucks wasn’t enough of a sign that they weren’t from around here, the fact that they could afford to order a slice of pie, even after breakfast, was.

  Then they’d roar off, one or two at a time, speeding down back roads that hadn’t seen tires—let alone whole pickups—that new in a long, long time.

  Sometimes they’d show up in person at a remote farmhouse. They were men, mostly, and most of them were from out-of-the-way corners of Texas or Oklahoma or West Virginia, hired no doubt because they could speak to the farmers in their own language. They’d park in the yard—the best of them were discreet enough to park a few yards away from the landowner’s rust-bucket truck or car so the comparison between the vehicles would not be so painfully obvious—and then they’d mount the front steps, search for a working doorbell, usually in vain, and then knock, sharply but politely, toeing the peeling porch paint with their brand-new Roper boots or Timberlands until someone answered the door. “Beautiful piece of land you have here,” they’d almost always begin, even when, as was often the case, all they could see from the porch was a sad patch of scree littered with rusted cultivators, mower blades, and wheel rims. Sometimes the men of the house would invite them inside. The women rarely did. Sometimes they’d just talk through the screen door. They’d chat with the farmers long enough to get a maybe, and then push on to the next house. Sometimes they were just a voice on the phone. They’d begin with the same drawled “How d’ya do, sir,” or “Hi, ma’am,” and modify their opening line only slightly: “I’ll bet that’s a beautiful piece of land you have there.”