He was, in many ways, the embodiment of a transformation that has changed the face of not just the oil and gas industries, but of geopolitics as well. I n the darkest days of the collapse of oil prices in the mids, McClendon, as ever undeterred, saw an opportunity in assembling packages of drilling rights — for gas, not oil — either to be sold to bigger companies or to be drilled.
In the mere existence of that opportunity, America is almost unique, because it is one of the few countries where private citizens, rather than governments, own the mineral rights under their properties.
In order to drill, you just have to persuade someone to give you a lease. That, it turned out, would make him the perfect person for the new world of fracking, which is not so much about finding the single gusher as it is about assembling the rights to drill multiple wells. Neither Ward nor McClendon were technological pioneers. That distinction, most people agree, goes to a man named George Mitchell, who drew on research done by the government to experiment on the Barnett Shale, an area of tight rock in the Fort Worth basin of North Texas.
On 12 February — a day McClendon would later describe as the best of his career — he and Ward took Chesapeake public. So McClendon and Ward simply switched accounting firms. They got in some good places because they shut everyone else out. That made some people millionaires, but it wreaked havoc on others. Nor was he frugal when it came to his personal life. He had one of the best wine collections in the world.
To Wall Street investors, McClendon was delivering on what they wanted most: consistency and growth. His pitch was that fracking had transformed the production of gas from a hit-or-miss proposition to one that operated with an on and off switch. It was manufacturing, not wildcatting.
B ack in , when McClendon was just getting started, the consensus view had been that the US was running out of natural gas. It became a fixation for Alan Greenspan, the once-revered chair of the Federal Reserve, who warned Congress during a rare appearance that the shortage and rising cost of gas could hurt the American economy. Steinsberger grew dejected, deciding he might have to leave the energy business. His wife, a part-time nurse caring for their two young children, made plans to move.
Steinsberger sat in his Fort Worth office, anxious and impatient. He watched daily results from three wells in the Barnett—the ones they had fracked with his radical, water-based mixture. The wells had been middling performers but Steinsberger held out hope for some good news. Most of his colleagues dismissed the results and rivals at other companies scoffed. Steinsberger and his colleagues tweaked their methods, using additional horsepower to pump the liquid, creating more fractures in the rock.
Their radical idea was to use smaller amounts of sand than usual to create micro-fractures in the shale. One day in , as Steinsberger examined results from a well called S. Griffin No. After ninety days, the Griffin was churning out natural gas at a remarkable pace. No Barnett well had ever produced even one million cubic feet of gas after ninety days; this one was doing much more. Steinsberger tried to distract himself with other work, worried the results might tail off. When he checked back after another thirty days, though, the Griffin well was still at it, producing huge amounts of natural gas, like an ever-flowing river.
The water-based liquid seemed to go out in every direction in the rock, creating complex mini-networks of cracks, enabling gas to flow to the surface. Through 15 years of failure, he ignored the supposed wisdom of the crowd. And in this case it was damn wrong. George Mitchell, Father of Fracking. Dec How to Frack Shale: Drill down to a layer of shale.
A more effective application of hydraulic fracturing to the well. It was in that the Barnett Shale was successfully mapped using microseismic imaging. The oil output was driven by , fracking wells producing 4. By December , US shale oil production stood at 8m barrels per day and continues to increase with the IEA suggested that production could reach a plateau of m barrels per day by the early s.
Outside of the US numerous other countries are making tentative steps into fracking. China, desperate to secure domestic sources of energy, is eager to tap into shale following the decline of its conventional resources and booming demand. In the US it was estimated that between and the fracking industry generated in excess of , jobs according to a study from Dartmouth College.
Whichever way you cut it, hydraulic fracturing seems to have arrived at just the right time for the oil and gas jobs market. To Frack or to Frac?
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