The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

by Russell Gold

  I asked him if he regretted never making it to college. “The money I’m making, it’s more than the kids coming out of college,” he replies. “And I’m not in debt. I don’t think I’ll ever leave the oil fields. I tried to leave a year and a half ago but couldn’t go anywhere the money was the same.” According to the state, the average oil-field annual wage in 2011 was $91,400.

  At a quarter to eleven the next night, the thirtieth frack of the Irene Kovaloff is completed. It takes three hours longer than expected, but otherwise the well is a success. Another crew opened up the Irene Kovaloff a couple days later. At first water flowed out. Soon came light, sweet Bakken crude mixed with the water. On October 22 the well produced eight hundred barrels of crude—a good, but not great, result. By early 2013, Marathon had pulled twenty thousand barrels of crude from the well. Considering that the oil had been locked away until the frack, it was good enough.

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  DOMINION OVER THE ROCKS

  Most hail Colonel Edwin L. Drake as the father of petroleum for drilling the well that sparked the world’s first oil boom, in Titusville, Pennsylvania. His success and tenacity were no guarantees of amassing a fortune. He died a pauper twenty-two years later, in 1880. When an acquaintance happened upon a destitute Drake in New York City not long before his death, he gave him a few dollars and later convinced the Pennsylvania legislature to create a $1,500 annual pension.

  Edward A. L. Roberts is all but forgotten. He arrived in Titusville a few years after Drake’s well and stayed. When he died in 1881, he was one of the richest men in the United States. His wealth came from a patent for a bomb, of sorts, that exploded in the bottom of oil wells. He is fracking’s father.

  The history of oilmen trying to create fissures in rocks goes back to the earliest years of the petroleum age. A well is only a few inches across. A wellbore could come tantalizingly close to an oil-filled seam and miss it entirely, coming up dry and bankrupting the wildcatter. But if the reach of the well could be extended, with the wellbore sending out fingers into the surrounding rock, that could make all the difference. Not long after the earliest wells were drilled in Western Pennsylvania, inventors began hawking ways to smash the rocks at the bottom of these wells. They didn’t call it fracking, but that is what they were trying to do. From the early oil pioneers to later generations of petroleum engineers, a remarkable amount of brutal ingenuity was deployed to find ways to explode, pulverize, incinerate, or melt rock. For decades, men tried to break rocks with increasing ferocity and impose their will on nature. By the 1970s, there was a saying among petroleum engineers, “When everything else fails, frack it.”

  There is a popular notion, particularly among opponents, that fracking is a new and untested technology. There’s a kernel of truth to it. Modern shale fracking began in 1998, and few shale wells are older than a decade. But researchers in oil companies were working on “hydrafracs” as far back as World War II—and they were building on earlier efforts.

  The earliest insight came during the US Civil War. Roberts was a nineteenth-century tinkerer who, before he set his sights on the new oil fields, devised a popular machine to help dentists make artificial teeth. Court-martialed during the Civil War for being drunk, he was also a litigious pugilist.

  Edwin Drake drilled the first commercially successful oil well in August 1859, when Roberts was still focused on dentures. New England investors recruited Drake, a railroad conductor, to go to Western Pennsylvania and see if he could find oil. He dug a well to a depth of sixty-nine feet when the drill quickly dropped another six inches. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the crew stopped work for the day. On Sunday the drilling supervisor visited the well and noticed a dark fluid floating on top of water in the pipe. He fashioned a long ladle from a piece of tin rain spouting and dipped it into the well. Up came oil. By Monday, when Drake returned, the driller had filled up several tubs and barrels with oil. A hand pump was installed on the well, which helped extract about eight to ten barrels of crude a day.

  The Drake well set off an oil boom. More wells were drilled in the area, including a few small gushers that blew oil into the air. But not all wells drilled near Titusville were so fecund. The industry would later develop sophisticated technology to search for oil deposits under thousands of feet of rocks, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, luck was often the difference between a successful oilman and an abject failure. John D. Rockefeller Sr. wanted no part of this crapshoot. He built the Standard Oil empire on refining and marketing oil. He left the hapless search for crude to others.

  When Edward Roberts arrived in Titusville in 1864, it was a far different place than the quiet milling town that had greeted Drake’s arrival a few years earlier. It was flush with speculators, oilmen, and prostitutes. Roberts’s patent for a compact machine that allowed dentists in their offices to melt rubber and create plates for fake teeth had already made him comfortable. When the Civil War began, he recruited troops for the Union and was soon appointed lieutenant colonel of the Twenty-Eighth New Jersey Infantry. By comparison, Drake’s “colonel” rank was a fabrication. Before he set off for Titusville, his financial backers sent letters addressed to “Colonel E. L. Drake” to await his arrival. Local residents, impressed, welcomed him warmly.

  Roberts did not distinguish himself during the war. While encamped outside Washington, DC, he showed up drunk for a dress parade. He was brought up before a court-martial in late 1862, before ever seeing a shot fired. While waiting for the tribunal’s decision, the army sent his regiment to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he participated in one of the bloodier battles of the war. Generals ordered Roberts’s unit to advance through the city, across a canal, and up a hill to dislodge Confederate positions. Artillery shells rained down on Roberts and the soldiers under his command. After the battle, he submitted his resignation in “the best interest of the regiment.” The army accepted it. A couple weeks later, the tribunal issued its edict. Found guilty, he was cashiered out of the military.

  His wartime misadventure, however, may have been the beginning of his famed invention. Roberts said later that his idea for using explosives inside an oil well came during the bombardment at the Battle of Fredericksburg. He noticed that some of the shells landed in a small canal and detonated underwater. The weight of the water tamped down the explosion, forcing the energy sideways into the earthen walls of the canal. Roberts decided to apply this principle to Pennsylvania’s new oil wells by placing an explosive device at the bottom of a water-filled well. The water forced the blast into the rocks, rather than up the well.

  The Roberts petroleum torpedo was the first successful tool for fracking rocks. Roberts brought six torpedoes to Titusville. They were tin cylinders filled with several pounds of gunpowder with a percussive cap attached to the top. Roberts’s hired hands lowered the torpedoes into wells by a long wire. Once in place, a piece of metal that resembled a fishing sinker slid down the line, setting off the cap and igniting the powder. In his 1866 patent, Roberts said he intended to “fracture the rock containing the oil to some distance around the wells, thus creating artificial seams, and enabling me to connect the well thereby with seams containing the oil that would not have been otherwise reached.” Oil well owners were reluctant to try the Roberts torpedo, fearful that it would cause their wells to cave in. But Roberts found a taker at the Ladies’ well, about a half mile north of Drake’s famous discovery, on the northern bank of Oil Creek. It was a poor well that had become clogged with waxy deposits. Roberts lowered his torpedo to a depth of 463 feet and detonated it. “The explosion caused the oil and water to shoot out of the well some thirty feet into the air, and made the ground groan like a great monster in the agonies of death,” noted a contemporary account. Not long afterward, the well started to flow more oil than ever before.

  Roberts achieved even greater success in late 1866 in the nearby Woodin well. It had been a dry hole, never producing any oil. The first torpedo started the well flowing at a rate of twenty barrels a day. T
he next month, Roberts fired a second torpedo, and the well began flowing eighty barrels a day. Word spread throughout the region, and demand for his torpedoes was brisk. Soon nitroglycerin replaced the gunpowder. Within a couple years, the local newspaper marveled at the importance of Roberts’s invention: “For the past three years, it has been a most successful operation, and has increased the production of oil in hundreds upon hundreds of oil wells to an extent which could hardly be overestimated. Next to the discovery of oil, no invention has done more to enrich well owners than the Roberts Torpedo.”

  From the beginning, some successful oilmen have tended to regard their business as a noble cause. Oil was more than a marketable commodity. Refined into kerosene, it brought light to the darkness. Roberts did not appear to subscribe to this idea. He was a capitalist and wanted to make money. He charged $200 for a medium-sized torpedo, a considerable sum at the time. His called his service well shooting.

  Roberts was not the first to test explosives in Western Pennsylvania’s new oil wells. But he was successful and had the foresight to patent his idea. Several lawsuits were filed against the patent, arguing that Roberts’s idea wasn’t so original after all. Courts ruled against these claims, and eventually Roberts obtained a lucrative monopoly. Oilmen were unhappy paying his steep rates but knew they needed to fracture the rocks to make the oil wells more profitable. A brisk business in illegal well shooting began. The scofflaws would mix their explosives during the day and then light their illicit torpedoes at night. They were called “moonlighters”—perhaps the first neologism the oil industry contributed to the English language. To stop this assault on his monopoly, Roberts hired the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, and the “torpedo war” broke out as the hired guns ranged across the Pennsylvania countryside looking for patent breakers.

  This war was also fought in the courts. Roberts—and his brother Walter, who was a partner in the company—threatened about two thousand lawsuits against oil producers who hired illegal moonlighters. By the end of the nineteenth century, Roberts was said to have filed more lawsuits than any other person in the United States. Most of the cases were settled out of court, further enriching Roberts. “By this means, the coffers of the company were filled to overflowing, and the Roberts brothers rolled up millions of dollars,” wrote a nineteenth-century participant in the oil boom.

  The Western Pennsylvania oil fields eventually faded, and the Roberts Torpedo dwindled in importance. Who needed to go through the dangerous, costly chore of breaking rocks once wildcatters began to find giant gushers? The first of these was Spindletop in 1901, but others arose in Texas, California, and Oklahoma. These wells were behemoths, and the oil poured out in unimaginable quantities without any explosives.

  Here is the archetypal story of discovery: after days of drilling, the well begins to rumble and growl. The derrick shakes ominously. Oil rockets skyward and falls to earth as a slick rain, coating dancing, joyous, and newly rich wildcatters. Like most good yarns, there’s some truth in this story. The famous Spindletop well exploded to life this way, setting off a mad scramble in swampy Southeast Texas to lease up acreage near the discovery. Wells were often so prolific that the crude was stored in man-made black ponds, but many of these short-lived gushers dried up as quickly as they roared to life, dribbling a few barrels of oil every day. When a well’s pressure gave out, oil hunters went off in search of their next big find. By the middle of the twentieth century, these gushers were largely a thing of the past. In the United States, they had been hunted to near extinction. The brief era of the gusher produced fortunes for lucky wildcatters but tended to generate oil gluts that often crashed prices. Energy was cheap and plentiful. Fracking wasn’t necessary.

  What was left behind were a lot of wells and a lot of oil still underground, trapped in the rocks. Hollywood, understandably, focused its lens on the moment of discovery—typified by Jimmy Stewart’s primal scream in 1953’s Thunder Bay as his hard hat and face soak in black gold. But the reality of oil production, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, was much less arresting visually. It involved finding ways to free oil and gas molecules that existed inside rocks’ tiny pore spaces. Not only could Hollywood not film this struggle, it was out of sight of oil-field workers. No one could see what happened a mile underground. But petroleum engineers, members of a brand-new fraternity, could try to understand and gain dominion over the rocks. It was their job to do what it took, whatever they could dream up, to smash the rocks and allow oily liquids and gas molecules to flow into the well.

  Following the torpedoes, the next major advance in the technology of wrestling oil from rocks occurred in 1932, when Dow Chemical began to use hydrochloric acid to dissolve rocks and create channels for oil. The first test took place in Midland, Michigan, near Dow’s headquarters. Company engineers mixed 500 gallons of acid with arsenic, used to prevent the steel pipes from corroding. It worked, increasing the well’s flow by threefold. The next year, in North Texas, another company decided to try injecting acid more forcefully into a well. This time 750 gallons of hydrochloric acid were injected, followed by oil to force the acid into the limestone formation. Before this treatment, the well had yielded only 1.5 barrels of oil a day. After the acid treatment, it flowed 125 barrels a day. A new industry was born. By 1938, some 25,000 wells had been “acidified,” and individual wells sometimes were given as much as 10,000 gallons of acid. But acidization had limited usefulness. It worked in limestone but not sandstone. This limitation was problematic, since many oil and gas reservoirs are sandstone. Engineers were on the lookout for something else to open up the rocks and force wells to give up their riches.

  One of the centers of the industry’s research effort was Tulsa, the self-proclaimed “Oil Capital of the World.” The heavyweight in town was Stanolind, which possessed girth and swagger from its origin as one of the companies formed in 1911 when the Supreme Court broke up the John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust. Soon after World War II, Stanolind undertook one of the earliest efforts to gather engineers and scientists on a campus to improve the industry’s knowledge and develop new techniques to maximize production. In 1952 it opened a palatial new research center on sixty acres at the cost of $4.5 million. The local newspaper marveled that it creates “a country club atmosphere, so immaculate does it keep its lawns.” Only a couple of companies had independent research units, including the Texas Oil Company, later Texaco; and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, later Exxon. The industry’s early decades were full of wildcatters who relied on superstitions and luck to find oil, but after World War II, the largest oil companies wanted to rely on science and engineering instead. (Some superstitions were unknowingly rooted in geological insights. Some early prospectors drilled in church cemeteries, believing that oil accumulated underneath. Their instinct was right, although not their logic. Many cemeteries were built on hills, and these high spots were an expression of a rock fold or salt dome underneath. Later, geologists realized that these subterranean structures often contained oil and gas.)

  Riley “Floyd” Farris, a studious man committed to applying science and mathematics to improve oil-field operations, emerged early on as one of Stanolind’s star researchers. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1935, nearly a decade before the school awarded its first bachelor degree in petroleum engineering. His interest was in cement. Then, as now, drillers deploy cement to fill the empty space in a well, locking the pipe in place. If the well is drilled through a shallow zone of water, the cement helps keep the water out of the well and anything from leaking into the aquifer. Farris wrote several papers trying to exhort manufacturers to provide better-quality cement and operators to pay more attention to how high temperatures and pressures degraded cement.

  One oil-field mystery intrigued Farris. Drillers noticed that when cement entered a well, some of it occasionally disappeared. Cement wasn’t cheap, and when it was lost, the well required additional costly cementing. Some wells needed up to five bat
ches of cement before they sealed properly. (At least, that was what good practice dictated. Sometimes it was deemed good enough and work proceeded. Some states had regulations covering how to cement wells; others didn’t.) The lost cement puzzled Farris. Why did some wells take more cement than the amount predicted by his slide-rule calculations? What was happening? Where was the cement going?

  While this phenomenon had been noted before, Farris was the first to study it systematically. He pulled files from 115 wells and determined there was a mathematical relationship between the pressure created by the cement and the depth of these wells. His conclusion was straightforward. The weight of the cement and other liquids in the well were rupturing the rocks, creating fractures. When the cement was squeezed into the wells, some was being lost into the cracks. What if he tried to fracture the rock by pumping in liquid? Unlike cement, liquid could be removed after it cracked the rocks. Once the fluid was removed, he thought, perhaps more oil and gas would seep out of the rocks.

  While Farris was quiet, his colleague Bob Fast was his opposite. He was friendly and outgoing, at ease both in the laboratory and in the oil field. His father worked as a tool pusher, or manager, of drilling rigs in Illinois. When oil discoveries in the Midwest petered out, the family migrated to Tulsa. In the booming city, oil-field work was easy to find. Fast received a degree in petroleum engineering at the University of Tulsa in 1943 and then spent a year fixing cracks in the wings of Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers during World War II. A year later, he joined Tulsa-based Stanolind Oil’s brand-new research effort.

  Fast was witty and had a devilish sense of humor. After many years with Stanolind (which became Amoco and later part of BP), he purchased land on the shore of the nearby Lake o’ the Cherokees to indulge his love of boating. He bought a double-sailed sloop and named it the Dammit Virginia after his second wife. He designed the lake house himself, burying it half underground to conserve energy and, in the 1970s, covered it in solar panels to provide heat and hot water. He also installed solar panels atop his home in Tulsa. His son, Rob Fast, remembers neighbors gawking at their unusual roof, then alien to Oklahoma. But Fast loved his solar panels. “It was free energy. It was practical technology and economic,” said his son.