The Boom (3 page)

One thing is certain. Nearly every well drilled in the United States is fracked. That’s one hundred wells a day, perhaps even a bit more, year-round. Whether you fear fracking or celebrate it, that’s a lot of holes in the ground.

This book is about the ecosystem and inhabitants of the new United States, one that I sometimes call Frackistan. To trace its emergence, I will begin deep underground and follow the path of the hydrocarbon up and out of the rocks. Humans do not create crude oil and natural gas. We gather it from deep underground, where it is created. Any book about fossil fuels must begin with rocks. They are, literally and figuratively, the foundation of the entire story.

Before the rigs are assembled, a company acquires the right to drill a well. This often involves finding who owns the mineral rights. As was the case with my parents, it’s the landowners. But in some cases, the mineral rights have been severed from surface ownership. One person owns the land and someone else owns what’s underneath. This split can be problematic for all involved. The hunt for leases is a central element of the story of modern American energy.

Once leases are signed and wells drilled, the energy molecules enter a labyrinthine system of pipes and machinery built by the energy industry to extract the oil and gas. To begin this journey requires fracking, the violent act of cracking open rocks. Without this initial interaction between humans and rocks, there would be no resurgence of US energy production, no fracking, and no book. I will spend time with the people, beginning more than a century ago, who pioneered fracking. Moving upward, the story becomes about the wells themselves and the freshwater in aquifers near the surface.

Of course, the story doesn’t end at the surface. That is where the energy industry interacts with people: neighbors who live near the wells, government officials, and environmentalists. It is also here that chief executives and corporations set this activity in motion and interact with the Wall Street money machine, without which the wells never would have been drilled. But this is not the end of the journey, and this book will also trace the final step. Eventually the bulk of this energy is burned to create electricity or heat homes. This releases carbon dioxide, which heads upward into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change. All along this path, the book will spend time with many of the inhabitants of this land, many of whom have struggled with the complexities of this new era and have arrived at surprising conclusions.

Why was Chesapeake so keen on north central Pennsylvania, in and around land my parents bought four decades ago? Why had a gaggle of landmen encamped at the Sullivan County Courthouse, rifling through real estate records untouched for decades to find who owned the mineral rights and bewildering overworked clerks who felt like the circus had come to town? The energy industry was chasing a giant deposit of sedimentary rock called the Marcellus Shale.

How did all this energy get here in the first place? Let’s begin at the beginning, or, at least, a long time ago. Most of the world’s continents have mountain ranges in the middle and great coastal plains on the edges. North America is different. Sixty million years ago, the broad collision of plates created the Rocky Mountains in the west and the Appalachian Mountains in the east. In between was an enormous, shallow ocean called the mid-Cretaceous inland sea. It covered the area we now call the Great Plains, Texas, and even reached up into what became Pennsylvania. Zooplankton and other small aquatic organisms lived in that sea, fed by the sun and nutrient-rich waters. When they died, they settled on the seabed. In this vast marine environment, over millennia, these dead creatures created a thick layer of organic material. Eventually rocks buried this sediment, an overburden that created pressure and generated heat. The organisms slowly cooked, broke down, and turned into natural gas and oil. Petroleum geologists have a simple term for shale. It is “source rock”—the birthplace of oil and gas. If water is the most abundant ingredient in fracking, it is also the ecosystem that generated the best energy-laden shale rocks in the first place.

Shales formed all over the planet as landmasses shifted around, leaving these fossil-fuel generators scattered on every continent and underneath the oceans. But not all shales are the same. Ancient lakes created shales that tend to have waxy hydrocarbons that cling to the rocks and resist modern petroleum extraction. Elsewhere, such as in China, where forest and woody debris constituted the primary organic ingredients, the resulting shales are layered with silty rocks, like a kitchen sink full of haphazardly stacked dirty dishes. But in the great waterway that covered North America, the conditions were just right for generating large, contiguous shales—the kind of deposits that in the modern era attracted Chesapeake, because it could carve up entire counties into rectangular units, each with its own set of wells, and drill with confidence that ninety-nine of every one hundred would find natural gas trapped inside the rock. It was an ideal setup for a shale factory.

At the end of the Cretaceous period, the waters receded, and the North American continent dried out. Beneath the surface, it was chockful of source rocks. The first that caught the attention of Mitchell Energy petroleum engineers in the early 1980s was the Barnett Shale in Texas. Driving from the northernmost well to the most southern would take about three hours depending on how heavy traffic was passing through downtown Fort Worth. By mid-2012, rigs had drilled more than fifteen thousand Barnett wells, mostly in four or five counties close to Fort Worth. They will drill thousands more before energy companies can no longer get enough gas out of the ground to justify the cost. And even then, gas will continue to seep out of the rocks and into wells for years after the drilling rigs have moved on.

In a global context, the 5,000-square-mile Barnett Shale is on the small side. On the other side of the world, Russia’s Bazhenov Shale sprawls for about 850,000 square miles, from the frozen Kara Sea nearly all the way to the steppes of Kazakhstan. It is about the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined. Due to a lack of roads, it is impossible to drive from its northern to southern boundaries. By one estimate, long-gone rivers deposited eighteen trillion tons of organic material on the bottom of an ancient sea. That’s a lot of carbon and hydrogen molecules that ended up as organic-rich siliceous shale.

This is the source rock for Siberia’s giant oil fields—and the source of much of modern Russia’s wealth and political strength. The trillions of tons of dead organisms baked in the heat of the earth and transformed, slowly, into oil droplets. Oil was expelled from the shale and traveled upward until impassable rock canopies trapped it. This process formed large oil reservoirs, not in underground pools but inside permeable rocks riddled with tiny holes that allowed billions of barrels’ worth of the sought-after liquid to collect. In any given year, Russia is either the world’s largest, or second largest, oil producer. This is due primarily to oil that escaped the Bazhenov. This narrative is a quintessential story of fossil fuel: organic material is converted into oil and gas inside the shale, and then the hydrocarbons escape and travel upward. If something blocks the molecules’ path, they will fill up porous rocks like water in a sponge and create a petroleum reservoir.

Almost every one of the world’s giant hydrocarbon reservoirs has filled up with molecules that were formed in shale source rocks and then exited at such a glacial rate that a time-lapse camera set to snap a frame every decade would make for boring viewing. California’s thick molasses crude came from the Monterey Shale. In North Africa, the Silurian shales of Algeria and Libya have earned those countries membership in the oil-exporting cartel OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Farther east, the same shales generated gas trapped in carbonate rock cavities now known as the giant North Field between Iran and Qatar, the world’s largest gas reservoir. In northern Europe, the Kimmeridgian Shales led to the 1970s North Sea oil boom. The poetically named La Luna Shale sits under Venezuela. The Qusaiba “hot shale” is believed to be the source of Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar, the largest single collection of crude oil that has ever been—and likely will ever be—discovered. These are conventional reservoirs that until a few years ago were the exclusive target of the world’s petroleum industry. “Drill a well and drain the reservoir” was the oilman’s mandate. But a century of rising global thirst for oil and gas has begun to exhaust these warehouses. The market demanded more, and the industry responded. It knew the nursery rocks still contained oil and gas, but how much? And could it be coaxed out?

The answers that have emerged over the past decade have spurred the industry forward. Many shales leaked off most of their hydrocarbon wealth, but others kept theirs locked away. Some, such as the Bazhenov, are so large that they leaked off billions of barrels but still have billions more stored away. How many more Barnetts and Marcelluses—geological turnkeys—are there? We don’t know. Until recently, few bothered to ask. The conventional thinking was that shales did not hold much economic value, and funding to study these rocks was paltry. Juergen Schieber, a professor of geology at Indiana University and one of the few academics interested in shale before the energy industry discovered how to frack it, said the gaps of knowledge remind him of sixteenth-century maps with large empty spaces and “Here be dragons” notations.

Humans have been following a path toward the source rock for as long as history has been recorded. At first the only hydrocarbons used by our ancestors made the long trip from source rocks up to the surface, avoiding geologic dead ends. Humans reveled in the utility of this gift. They used it to caulk boats and cook food. In places, it thickened the earth and was shoveled out to bind bricks together. In ancient Mesopotamia, the builders of the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon likely used this oleaginous bitumen as mortar. Eventually humans dug deeper in search of more. In 1821 a shallow well in Fredonia, New York, produced enough natural gas to light streetlamps for the town. In Europe and Central Asia, oily dirt was mined and refined into kerosene to be burned for light. As demand for the fuel grew, tinkerers and then professional engineers invented ways to delve into the earth in search of larger, untapped reservoirs. Refiners distilled this crude oil into fuel. Before long, there was the Ford Mustang and men on the moon.

Civilization has been heading toward source rock for a few thousand years; toward the geological kitchen where heat and pressure turned organic material into hydrocarbons. Now, with fracking, there’s a lot more oil and gas to be extracted. But once we’ve reached the source rock, we’ve gone as far back as possible. You can’t devise technology to dig deeper and reach even further back in geologic time. Source rock is where plankton turned into hydrocarbons. There is no further back. This is it.

2

OTTIS GRIMES

Drilling and fracking is a loud, noisy business. Smelly too. People rely on energy and enjoy its benefits, but who wants to live near a well? Sometimes the petroleum-laden rocks are conveniently remote. In 1967, drillers discovered Alaska’s enormous Prudhoe Bay oil field a couple hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Years later, floating drilling platforms tapped into massive oil and gas deposits in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a long helicopter flight from shorefront homes. The shale boom is different. Wells spread out across entire counties. As of 2013, more than fifteen million Americans lived within a mile of a well that had been fracked in the past few years.

This new proximity between wells and homes is one of the defining features of the new energy landscape. If wells weren’t allowed within a mile of the nearest home, United States oil and gas output would very likely be declining. But that isn’t the path we’ve chosen. The country and its courts long ago decided that unfettering drillers provided desirable rewards. Some homeowners would be compensated for their troublesome new neighbors; others weren’t so fortunate. This arrangement is being tested in the era of fracking.