George Phydias Mitchell, “The Father of Fracking,” a technique for extracting natural gas and oil that is making the United States energy-independent, died last month at the age of 94.
The Texas oilman transformed global energy markets by figuring out how to drill into and along layers of gas-laden shale rock, then force a slurry of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock to crack it open and release the hydrocarbons.
Engineers later learned how to adapt this process, known as fracking, to oil-bearing rock.
His son, research scientist B. Greg Mitchell, head of the Photobiology Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, sat down with Intellectual Capital to reminisce about how his father did it.
Q: Your father’s success with fracking came only after 17 years and tens of millions of dollars in drilling. “The cagey old guy pulled one last rabbit from his hat,” as one energy analyst phrased it, since George Mitchell was close to 80. What were the qualities that made him so successful?
A: Persistence in everything he did. Once he decided he believed in something, he would visualize what he wanted to achieve and stick to it for the long term, no matter the odds or the naysayers. Once he thought it through rationally, that this was the thing to do, you couldn’t get him off it.
Q: Was it science or instinct?
A: He crossed knowledge with intuition. He was a savvy geologist, a world-class petroleum engineer who graduated top of his class (at what is now Texas A&M). He knew rock. He knew drilling. He knew geochemistry at least on some level. He was the best. But he was also a prolific wildcatter. What’s a wildcatter, some crazy Texas oilman who might get lucky or not? No, he had the ability to take a calculated risk based on a rational knowledge base.
Q: How did he get his start?
A: Here’s the story as I remember it. There was a bookie from Chicago who would come to Texas and take bets on sporting events, horse races and boxing matches. My father didn’t gamble, but some of his investors did, for fun. The bookie comes from Dallas and he says, “I hear there are some very good wells coming in from a certain area.” So my Uncle Johnny and my father go to the Texas Railroad Commission, where they keep a log of all wells drilled. My dad was young but smart, and he sees the strata, the regional formation, and notices that wells are working 30 miles apart. He realizes this is one huge stratigraphic trap. They went out and leased about 300,000 acres in 90 days. When they saw an opportunity, wham! They went for it.
I asked him a few weeks ago what money they had to do this. He said they had some, but they borrowed the rest, leveraged it. That was part of his success, too. If his company wasn’t growing, he was in trouble because he would always borrow right up to the limit. And he had to grow 10 percent more to continue to borrow. He was close to bankruptcy several times.
Once they had this massive gas field, they started poking wells in it, and it went gangbusters. Now, you have to imagine how natural gas percolates up out of the source rock and gets trapped. You drill into the sand for the easy gas and oil, but he knew that underlying this, the source rock had to be below. That’s just how it works. Then in the ’70s, they started to run out of gas, literally, in the shallower sands. Sometimes they would go deeper into the shale, but they couldn’t get commercial quantities.
Q: It looked like America was running out of gas, then, too.
A: Yes, after the Middle East oil crisis, under President Jimmy Carter, there was a push to see if we could get gas and oil out of all the shale we had. They weren’t fracking, but they were mapping it. It was too risky for the private sector. So the government did it, and they got a lot of flack for it. They experimented with horizontal drilling and there was fracking and they knew where the shale was, but nobody could put it all together. My dad came up with the secret sauce.
Q: How?
A: They tried a lot of different things, sand, various fluids, and then one of the engineers tried this thing he called “slick water.” I’m sure it had nasty chemicals in it, petroleum, a surfactant — gels worked to push the shale apart, but they were expensive — and slick water was cheap.
My father liked problem solving. He loved brainstorming in a group. It’s an attribute to be able to do that. ... It was not an aha moment like Einstein, e=mc². That was precise. This was more of a giant high school chemistry experiment using millions of dollars, a very complicated matrix. What kind of detergents? Then what was the reservoir? Whatever worked on the Barnett Shale, which is mostly natural gas, is different than the Eagle Ford, which has a lot of oil in it, and that’s different than the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, which is mostly oil.
Q: So he needed to save the company ...
A: His company was going to shrink if he could not expand proven reserves. He needed a new source, a replacement. So, from a purely business point of view, he needed to solve the problem, but I truly believe that his motivation stemmed from the oil crisis and our addiction to Middle East oil and our need to be independent and strong. Save his company, save his country. Many times in the early ’80s, he would rant and rave that U.S. energy policy was stupid. He would say these dictators overseas are only going to get worse, and it will be an economic and social disaster on a global scale, unless we solved it, and, in fact, he said, we can solve it. Of course, there is natural gas there. We just don’t know how to get it.
I believe he stuck with fracking not just because he knew he could make money but so America could stay strong for the next 100 years and bridge into sustainability, because if you don’t have the energy required to run your economy, you are weak, and if you have to tax yourself too high to secure the sea lanes around the world to protect your foreign energy supplies, then you won’t have the capital to develop the new energy sources.
Q: So you think that he envisioned these new petroleum resources as a bridge to sustainability?
A: You can’t just mandate the suppression of fossil fuels to be replaced by very interesting green technologies, because none are big enough yet to fuel our economy. It’s too early. It will kill the economy. Natural gas, done properly, could provide that bridge.
My father was greatly influenced by Buckminster Fuller in his Spaceship Earth speech. Dad’s views on sustainability were expressed in a National Academies of Science report that he sponsored, chaired by then-Scripps Director A. Freiman, called “Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability.” You have to define where you are and then define the transition steps. You can’t just say, let’s go solar tomorrow.
My father felt if he could get shale to work, he could lay out a distributed supply to what we are addicted to now, get us off one regional area of extreme volatility, and make us energy independent in North America. Then we would be strong enough to transition. I truly think he believed more in that than just making money.
Q: Are you saying that fracking is the transitional solution to global warming?
A: Standing on the shoulders of a giant, Buckminster Fuller, my father could see farther than the rest of us, and way before industrial society appreciated it and especially before the capital markets saw this.
Here at Scripps, we clearly see this as essential to do. We’ve got the Keeling Curve (showing the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere) and so how do we solve the problem that Dave Keeling has shown so clearly, for the posterity of our children and grandchildren? My father thought the solution was reducing threats of war through energy independence, and that then our nation’s uniquely creative abilities would eventually solve the problem.
Now Dave Keeling’s son Ralph, a colleague of mine at Scripps Institution, and I are working with many others nationally and internationally to define precisely the challenges and create solutions. I have helped to found the California Center for Algae Biotechnology and, at a national level, the Algae Biomass Organization. Algae may be part of the solution. It will take us decades, but like my father I have thought this through and I do not plan to give up on this potential solution. The secret sauce is this: Think, create, persist.
Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectual capitalchapple@gmail.com
© Copyright 2013 The San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC. An MLIM LLC Company. All rights reserved.
The Texas oilman transformed global energy markets by figuring out how to drill into and along layers of gas-laden shale rock, then force a slurry of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock to crack it open and release the hydrocarbons.
Engineers later learned how to adapt this process, known as fracking, to oil-bearing rock.
His son, research scientist B. Greg Mitchell, head of the Photobiology Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, sat down with Intellectual Capital to reminisce about how his father did it.
Q: Your father’s success with fracking came only after 17 years and tens of millions of dollars in drilling. “The cagey old guy pulled one last rabbit from his hat,” as one energy analyst phrased it, since George Mitchell was close to 80. What were the qualities that made him so successful?
A: Persistence in everything he did. Once he decided he believed in something, he would visualize what he wanted to achieve and stick to it for the long term, no matter the odds or the naysayers. Once he thought it through rationally, that this was the thing to do, you couldn’t get him off it.
Q: Was it science or instinct?
A: He crossed knowledge with intuition. He was a savvy geologist, a world-class petroleum engineer who graduated top of his class (at what is now Texas A&M). He knew rock. He knew drilling. He knew geochemistry at least on some level. He was the best. But he was also a prolific wildcatter. What’s a wildcatter, some crazy Texas oilman who might get lucky or not? No, he had the ability to take a calculated risk based on a rational knowledge base.
Q: How did he get his start?
A: Here’s the story as I remember it. There was a bookie from Chicago who would come to Texas and take bets on sporting events, horse races and boxing matches. My father didn’t gamble, but some of his investors did, for fun. The bookie comes from Dallas and he says, “I hear there are some very good wells coming in from a certain area.” So my Uncle Johnny and my father go to the Texas Railroad Commission, where they keep a log of all wells drilled. My dad was young but smart, and he sees the strata, the regional formation, and notices that wells are working 30 miles apart. He realizes this is one huge stratigraphic trap. They went out and leased about 300,000 acres in 90 days. When they saw an opportunity, wham! They went for it.
I asked him a few weeks ago what money they had to do this. He said they had some, but they borrowed the rest, leveraged it. That was part of his success, too. If his company wasn’t growing, he was in trouble because he would always borrow right up to the limit. And he had to grow 10 percent more to continue to borrow. He was close to bankruptcy several times.
Once they had this massive gas field, they started poking wells in it, and it went gangbusters. Now, you have to imagine how natural gas percolates up out of the source rock and gets trapped. You drill into the sand for the easy gas and oil, but he knew that underlying this, the source rock had to be below. That’s just how it works. Then in the ’70s, they started to run out of gas, literally, in the shallower sands. Sometimes they would go deeper into the shale, but they couldn’t get commercial quantities.
Q: It looked like America was running out of gas, then, too.
A: Yes, after the Middle East oil crisis, under President Jimmy Carter, there was a push to see if we could get gas and oil out of all the shale we had. They weren’t fracking, but they were mapping it. It was too risky for the private sector. So the government did it, and they got a lot of flack for it. They experimented with horizontal drilling and there was fracking and they knew where the shale was, but nobody could put it all together. My dad came up with the secret sauce.
Q: How?
A: They tried a lot of different things, sand, various fluids, and then one of the engineers tried this thing he called “slick water.” I’m sure it had nasty chemicals in it, petroleum, a surfactant — gels worked to push the shale apart, but they were expensive — and slick water was cheap.
My father liked problem solving. He loved brainstorming in a group. It’s an attribute to be able to do that. ... It was not an aha moment like Einstein, e=mc². That was precise. This was more of a giant high school chemistry experiment using millions of dollars, a very complicated matrix. What kind of detergents? Then what was the reservoir? Whatever worked on the Barnett Shale, which is mostly natural gas, is different than the Eagle Ford, which has a lot of oil in it, and that’s different than the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, which is mostly oil.
Q: So he needed to save the company ...
A: His company was going to shrink if he could not expand proven reserves. He needed a new source, a replacement. So, from a purely business point of view, he needed to solve the problem, but I truly believe that his motivation stemmed from the oil crisis and our addiction to Middle East oil and our need to be independent and strong. Save his company, save his country. Many times in the early ’80s, he would rant and rave that U.S. energy policy was stupid. He would say these dictators overseas are only going to get worse, and it will be an economic and social disaster on a global scale, unless we solved it, and, in fact, he said, we can solve it. Of course, there is natural gas there. We just don’t know how to get it.
I believe he stuck with fracking not just because he knew he could make money but so America could stay strong for the next 100 years and bridge into sustainability, because if you don’t have the energy required to run your economy, you are weak, and if you have to tax yourself too high to secure the sea lanes around the world to protect your foreign energy supplies, then you won’t have the capital to develop the new energy sources.
Q: So you think that he envisioned these new petroleum resources as a bridge to sustainability?
A: You can’t just mandate the suppression of fossil fuels to be replaced by very interesting green technologies, because none are big enough yet to fuel our economy. It’s too early. It will kill the economy. Natural gas, done properly, could provide that bridge.
My father was greatly influenced by Buckminster Fuller in his Spaceship Earth speech. Dad’s views on sustainability were expressed in a National Academies of Science report that he sponsored, chaired by then-Scripps Director A. Freiman, called “Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability.” You have to define where you are and then define the transition steps. You can’t just say, let’s go solar tomorrow.
My father felt if he could get shale to work, he could lay out a distributed supply to what we are addicted to now, get us off one regional area of extreme volatility, and make us energy independent in North America. Then we would be strong enough to transition. I truly think he believed more in that than just making money.
Q: Are you saying that fracking is the transitional solution to global warming?
A: Standing on the shoulders of a giant, Buckminster Fuller, my father could see farther than the rest of us, and way before industrial society appreciated it and especially before the capital markets saw this.
Here at Scripps, we clearly see this as essential to do. We’ve got the Keeling Curve (showing the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere) and so how do we solve the problem that Dave Keeling has shown so clearly, for the posterity of our children and grandchildren? My father thought the solution was reducing threats of war through energy independence, and that then our nation’s uniquely creative abilities would eventually solve the problem.
Now Dave Keeling’s son Ralph, a colleague of mine at Scripps Institution, and I are working with many others nationally and internationally to define precisely the challenges and create solutions. I have helped to found the California Center for Algae Biotechnology and, at a national level, the Algae Biomass Organization. Algae may be part of the solution. It will take us decades, but like my father I have thought this through and I do not plan to give up on this potential solution. The secret sauce is this: Think, create, persist.
Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectual capitalchapple@gmail.com
© Copyright 2013 The San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC. An MLIM LLC Company. All rights reserved.
