by Russell Gold
In November 1946 Bob Fast set out to test Farris’s theory in the Hugoton natural gas field in southwestern Kansas. Fast was a twenty-five-year-old looking to make a name for himself in Stanolind’s research department, and he hoped that fracking the Klepper #1 well would provide a wanted career boost. Colonel Roberts performed the first frack jobs using explosives, but Fast and Farris pulled off their first fracks using a liquid. Since water generates friction—requiring a lot of pumps to inject it into the well—Fast looked for a way to reduce water’s friction. He needed a liquid that was slick, mixed well with water, and was readily abundant. Fast settled on napalm left over from World War II, since it was no longer needed to fuel flamethrowers and fill bombs dropped over Japan.
Worried about fire hazards, the mixing tanks and pumps were placed about 150 feet from one another, creating an odd sight in an industry where equipment was typically crowded together. The unusual well configuration caught the attention of industry spies. Numerous companies employed scouts to keep an eye on their competitors to see how deep they were drilling and if the wells were successful. In the pancake-flat area of Kansas, the spies didn’t even try to hide. They often parked near a well and watched the operation, taking notes dutifully. The Chevron scout assigned to the Klepper noted the size of the pipes used and the well’s depth. “Rust” was all he wrote, cryptically, under drilling remarks.
Fast pumped in one thousand gallons of napalm-thickened gasoline, followed by two thousand gallons of gasoline. He repeated this four times at different depths. He appears to have created fractures in the limestone. The pressure dropped each time, indicating that the liquid was leaving the well. When the napalm and gasoline were recovered, gas flowed out of the well. But it was about the same amount of gas that would be expected with a conventional well that had been soaked in acid. The frack job was a failure, but Fast and Farris would soon return with other experiments.
Stanolind’s research into what it called “hydrafrac treatment” wasn’t in the name of pure science. The company wanted to make wells more productive. By the middle of the twentieth century, the difficulty of finding large new oil fields weighed on the industry. It settled for lesser wells and focused on cutting costs and wringing every barrel out of a well. Oil companies had already invested in drilling these wells and building pipelines, so a new technology to get another 5 percent of the oil or gas in the reservoir could be quite profitable. What’s more, during World War II, steel was needed to build tanks, bombers, and other military machines. A relatively shallow 4,300-foot-deep well required sixty-one tons of steel for the pipes. The oil industry was caught in a bind. It needed to increase oil production to satisfy the war effort, but it had limited supplies of steel required for new wells and pipelines. The solution was to return to oil wells that had already been drilled but were languishing. By the 1940s, the industry had drilled more than one million wells. More than half had been abandoned altogether or were producing just a trickle of oil and gas. These wells were considered played out. Fast and his colleagues at Stanolind wanted to see if fracturing wells could resuscitate old wells and make new wells more productive.
The United States ramped up oil and gas production to meet demands of fighting World War II. After the war effort wound down, demand for fuel kept rising as the economy boomed. By 1948, there were 3.3 million more cars on the road than seven years earlier. There were nearly a million more oil furnaces heating homes. With demand outpacing production, the industry was running full tilt to keep up. In February 1948 cold weather spread across the country, and fuel shortages occurred. A Chrysler plant in Detroit laid off workers because it couldn’t get enough natural gas from Texas. There wasn’t enough fuel oil for furnaces, and people lined up in Chicago and Saint Petersburg, Florida, to fill jerry cans. Even before this episode, the industry realized the growing urgency to deliver more oil and gas. Its search took it offshore, and in 1947 the Oklahoma City energy exploration company Kerr-McGee made the first oil discovery from a platform in the Gulf of Mexico—so far offshore that it was out of sight of land. One of Kerr-McGee’s partners on the well was Stanolind Oil.
While Kerr-McGee was making history offshore, Bob Fast and Floyd Farris kept pursuing their idea that onshore wells could be fracked. The problem they faced was that while they could infer what was occurring when cement was lost, they didn’t really know. They wanted to see what happened. So they drilled a nine-and-a-half-foot well into a shallow sandstone formation near their Tulsa offices and squeezed in cement. Then they dug up the well to see what had happened. What they saw confirmed Farris’s hunch. The cement was fracturing the sandstone and spreading out in all directions. In one area, it had traveled more than five feet from the well. It may have spread even farther, but they had excavated only a five-foot circle. The result was so striking that they repeated the experiment a dozen more times. Fast and Farris found cement that had caused vertical as well as horizontal fractures.
As they grew comfortable with their ability to fracture rock with cement, they encountered a problem. Fractures with water would close up once the water was removed. Why not mix in some sand with the water to prop open the fractures? This was first tried in East Texas on a well that was producing less than a barrel of oil every day. A mixture of sand, crude oil, and a soap laced with metals was pumped into the well and left to sit for forty-eight hours. The soap scrubbed the oil off the rocks. When the petroleum concoction was removed, the well began to produce fifty barrels of oil a day. The engineers hoped their hydrafrac treatments would boost a well for a few weeks or even a few months. But to their surprise, the fracked wells kept flowing. It wasn’t the oil industry’s answer to eternal youth, but it was a revitalizing drug that kept aging wells producing like teenagers for a few years. They had widened the well’s drawing radius, sucking more hydrocarbons out of the ground.
In May 1948 Farris filed a fracking patent. “This invention pertains to a method of increasing the productivity of an oil or gas well by providing lateral drainage channels in selected formations adjacent to a well,” he wrote. The patent includes a description of an East Texas well. Before it was fracked, it was barely flowing. The well produced only enough oil to fill a tablespoon every eight seconds. Fast, as usual, conducted the field experiment. About 122 barrels of fluid were injected into the well: a mixture of crude oil, solvents, and aluminum soap—the latter an ingredient in napalm, now used for waterproofing. He mixed sand into the liquid, hoping that it would remain in the fractures, propping them open. The liquid was pumped in to 3,400 pounds per square inch of pressure, about the same as a top-of-the-line, commercial-grade pressure washer available today. The sandstone fractured. Liquid flowed in. Fast kept the liquid in the well for two days and then took it out. On a sustained basis, the well flowed fifty times more oil than it had before being fractured. An exclusive license was issued to HOWCO, the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company.
For decades, the industry had poked holes in the earth, praying to get lucky and hit a gusher. It had even found some success with brute force—setting off nitroglycerin in a well—to get out more oil. The Stanolind experiments hinted at a different future. Engineers could manipulate the earth. Deeply buried rocks could be conquered by the engineers being churned out of universities. It was a turning point for the oil industry, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time. The age of the wildcatter was drawing to a close. The age of the petroleum engineer had begun. From this point on, the industry would be defined by men convinced they had the tools and science to bend rocks to their will.
In October 1948 one of Fast’s colleagues wrote up Stanolind’s findings and published them in the profession’s leading journal, Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. The paper sets out the basic elements of modern fracking: pumping in liquids under pressure to create a fracture and sending in sand to prop open the cracks. The hydrafrac process boosted production in eleven out of twenty-three wells. And it wasn’t expensive. “It is significant that the val
ue of the additional oil and gas produced to date through the benefits of this process has already exceeded the combined cost of research, development and all field tests,” the paper noted. The work at Stanolind was an immediate sensation. Journal editors made it their lead paper for the year.
The paper drew the attention of one of the preeminent engineers of the day, M. King Hubbert. It “was very, very important and naturally attracted a great deal of excitement,” he recalled later. Oil companies adopted fracking rapidly. By 1955, less than a decade after the first experiments, more than one hundred thousand wells had been fracked.
Hubbert is best remembered today as the father of peak oil theory. His argument was that the amount of oil in the world is finite and that as production increases, it will reach a peak and then begin to decline. Drawn on a graph, his forecast resembled a bell curve. In the late 1940s, he became interested in the question of how many years of oil supply could be pumped out of the earth and set out to figure it out. At the same time, he studied hydraulic fracturing and wrote a seminal paper on the new technology. The two interests were connected. If hydraulic fracturing could significantly increase the availability of oil and gas, it would make more oil available and push back the date of “Hubbert’s Peak.” But he was not impressed with Stanolind’s hydrafracs. In his famous 1956 paper outlining his ideas on peak oil, he noted that only about one-third of the oil in a reservoir was being recovered. The rest was out of reach. New techniques, he wrote, “are gradually being improved so that ultimately a somewhat larger but still unknown fraction of the oil underground should be extracted.”
He calculated that peak oil in the United States would occur between 1965 and 1970, and these new technologies would, at best, slow the decline on the far side of the bell curve. Despite familiarizing himself with hydraulic fracturing, Hubbert fundamentally misjudged its impact. US oil production did peak in 1970, as he predicted, and began to decline. By 2008, it was half the level of the peak. But then it started to increase again—in 2009 and each year for the next several years. We have left Hubbert’s bell curve, and it’s all due to the work begun by Farris and Fast.
Fracking techniques evolved quickly. By 1956, companies had begun using more and more water, with fewer additives, as a frack fluid. This ran counter to conventional wisdom, which held that water would damage the reservoir and prevent oil and gas from escaping. Laboratory engineers recommended against using water, but early efforts in the oil fields proved successful. Cheaper than crude oil, water allowed companies to increase the amount of fluid they injected into wells. Fracks that used five to ten times as much fluid as the early Stanolind efforts became commonplace. Injection rates increased twentyfold, pumping in more fluid to put more pressure on the rocks and create more fractures. In addition, innovative pumping equipment added more horsepower to the job.
Bob Fast and his colleagues at Stanolind continued their work on hydraulic fracturing through the years. The company grew interested in using highly explosive rocket fuel to make larger fractures. This decision was ill fated. On November 11, 1970, a work crew drilled a hole to test the fuel as a frack fluid. A piece of equipment was backed into an electric line, somehow triggering an explosion. The blast killed eight workers and blasted a hole five feet deep and twenty-five feet across. Fast, typically the on-site supervisor, wasn’t there. He was away on his annual deer hunting trip. His son said he had survivor’s guilt and wondered if he could have prevented the accident had he been there. Fast retired a couple years later with an impressive list of accomplishments: thirty-five patents and twenty-five published technical papers.
Hubbert’s famous paper isn’t all doom and gloom. He was a pessimist about the longevity of oil supply, but he believed that coal’s abundance would provide fuel well into the future. The possibility of nuclear energy excited him. When he presented his paper, the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant was under construction in Seascale, England. Bob Fast shared Hubbert’s enthusiasm for nuclear energy. Years later, Fast would get mad at the television whenever the news showed antinuclear protests. He grew up in the Great Depression and was unable to join the Boy Scouts because his family didn’t have enough money for dues. He drew a line connecting abundant energy and the postwar American boom. To him, protesting nuclear energy was tantamount to protesting cheap energy and economic well-being.
By 1959, the oil industry was also interested in the power unleashed by nuclear reactions, but for an entirely different reason. It wanted to use nuclear bombs to frack wells. Edward Teller, a father of the hydrogen bomb, convened a meeting that year at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory—now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—to discuss peaceful uses of nuclear power. Teller suggested it could be used for mining and excavation. The US Atomic Energy Commission agreed and created Project Plowshare, named after the biblical verse from the book of Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” The program focused first on using the power of the atom as a massive earthmover. The government toyed with the idea of using bombs to carve out a new deepwater harbor in Alaska and build a new canal through Panama. None of these ideas ever made it off the drawing board, beset by technical problems and environmental worries. But a partnership between the government and El Paso Natural Gas became a reality. The Plowshare scientists wanted to know whether using nuclear blasts to fracture rocks around wells would work and be cost effective. “Aspects outside the scope of a technical program—political, sociological, and psychological considerations—were not matters of AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] concern,” notes The Nuclear Impact: A Case Study of the Plowshare Program to Produce Gas by Underground Stimulation in the Rocky Mountains, a 1976 book about the program written by Frank Kreith and Catherine B. Wrenn. This oversight would doom nuclear fracturing, as would another problem.
In 1967, scientists detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb outside of Farmington, New Mexico. Cheered by local civic leaders and state officials, the bomb was lowered three-quarters of a mile into a gas well, nestled in a shale rock formation. The resulting blast cleared out a cavity about 160 feet across. Called Project Gasbuggy, the blast worked. But the gas that flowed into the well contained radioactive tritium and other isotopes. Plowshare scientists decided to get bigger, in an effort to get out more gas and improve the economic return of spending tens of millions of dollars on bombs. The next detonation was called Rulison, after a town on the interstate in western Colorado. The Rulison bomb was bigger—forty-three kilotons—and exploded deeper in the ground. (For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 was about thirteen kilotons.) With little fanfare, the Rulison bomb was detonated in September 1969, in the waning days of the summer of Woodstock. This time measurements indicated rock fractured 250 feet from ground zero. It was called a “rubble chimney,” a term to describe the extent of the smashed rock. When gas came out of the well, it was commingled with high levels of tritium and krypton-85. The Atomic Energy Commission studied potential exposure if the gas were put into pipelines and delivered to homes. The two cities that would receive the highest dosage of radioactivity from burning the gas to heat homes or cook food were Rifle, near the bomb site, and Aspen. The dosage was small, but this was only a single well.
These muscular attempts to smash open the rock caught the attention of the White House. In a 1971 energy speech, Richard Nixon talked about how finding more natural gas will “be one of our most urgent energy needs in the next few years.” And he threw his support for “nuclear stimulation experiments which seek to produce natural gas from tight geologic formations which cannot presently be utilized.” With backing from the top, Project Plowshare and its industry allies upped the ante. The next test would explode three nuclear bombs simultaneously—each one larger than the bomb used for Gasbuggy. They would be placed far enough from each other that the impact zones would create a vast vertical column of cracked rock from which gas could flow.
Advocates believed that they could
blast their way out of the energy deficit that the United States was entering. They hoped it could become a common oil-field tool—“something we can use any day of the week in any gas field,” said an El Paso engineer. The Rio Blanco blast, also in western Colorado, took place in May 1973, at a time of natural gas shortages. A couple months earlier, the reality of the energy crisis hit home when Denver public schools had shuttered because there wasn’t enough gas to heat the buildings. Project sponsors of the blast created a newsletter—the Rio Blanco News—and announced in the first issue, “Gas from Project Rio Blanco Unit Could Equal 10-Year Supply for the States.” This optimism did not match the results. The three bombs created rubble chimneys, but the fractured rock from each blast didn’t connect. Gas emerged only from the uppermost blast. Instead of a ten-year supply of gas, the main legacy of the blast is an official plaque at ground zero warning against digging the soil or drilling down without permission from the government.
Undaunted, Project Plowshare planners kept getting more ambitious. The next test, called Project Wagon Wheel, involved five hundred-kiloton devices. And this array was just the beginning. If successful, the Atomic Energy Commission and El Paso envisioned forty to fifty detonations a year in southern Wyoming. But this time the atomic promoters and engineers met their match. Local residents organized to stop it. There was concern about the impact of so much earth shaking on local roads and irrigation ditches. The economics of nuking gas wells was also questionable. The Department of Energy later pointed out that $82 million had been spent on the project, but even if the gas wells flowed for twenty-five years, only a fraction of the cost would be recovered.