The Boom (38 page)

Some argue that natural gas can help reduce carbon emissions. Others counter that it’s not enough—and the reduction isn’t nearly quick enough. They argue for a large-scale switch to wind, solar, and nuclear, none of which emits carbon. The two positions may not be mutually exclusive. The cost of renewable energy is falling quickly and is increasingly the same price as coal, gas, and other conventional fuels—even without subsidies. This will mean more demand for renewable energy. But since most renewable power comes and goes with clouds and the wind, an energy analyst for Citigroup noted in a large report to investors, more renewables will, in turn, drive demand for more gas-fired plants that can turn on and off quickly. The analyst said that gas and renewables formed a “symbiotic relationship.”

John Hanger has spent a lot of time thinking about the future of energy. He spent his career as a lawyer, advocate, and government official, all the time focused on energy. He represented Philadelphia’s poor when the local gas company wanted to disconnect them for failure to pay their bills. He founded Penn Future, a Pennsylvania environmental group. He served on the state’s utility commission and championed electric-power deregulation. And he was the state’s environmental protection commissioner when the Marcellus Shale drilling boom began in earnest. He’s also an inveterate blogger on fracking and energy topics, often punctuating interesting facts with “Wow!” or “Amazing!” In late 2012 he announced a long-shot candidacy to become governor of Pennsylvania in 2014.

A year after Aubrey McClendon riled up a crowd of energy executives at the Pennsylvania Convention Center while protesters outside chanted “Hydrofracking’s got to go!” I attended the same conference. Again there were protesters outside with signs and speeches. Inside, an Exxon executive placed the development of shale gas in the pantheon of great American innovations, such as the lightbulb and the personal computer. The two sides’ positions had hardened. Communication and compromise were elusive. John Hanger and I left this deadlock and walked a couple blocks away to get lunch. He started off by describing himself as a pragmatist. He thinks environmentalists who don’t want to push natural gas to eliminate coal are “tragically mistaken.” Spearing some pasta on a fork, he said, “I love renewables, but it is just irresponsible not to capture the environmental benefits of gas today. It is real. It is huge.”

People might not want to hear this, he went on, “but Aubrey McClendon may have done more to cut climate emissions—while saying he doesn’t believe it’s a serious issue—than most environmentalists, individually or cumulatively.”

Natural gas is here today. It’s a powerful, nimble fuel that can sate modern society’s desire for electricity to run smart phones, heat homes in the winter, and provide base materials for an unending supply of plastic goods, from car bumpers to toys, and even to parts of the microphone that Josh Fox used, for a second year, to address the crowd on the streets outside the conference. But even the abundance brought about by fracking the source rocks won’t last forever. Proponents like to talk about a hundred-year supply of natural gas in the United States. Few people who have spent time studying gas markets take this seriously. I don’t believe it. The new gas is real, but so is rising demand from new manufacturing facilities, power plants, and exporters looking to send it to Asia. At some point in my lifetime—and certainly in my children’s—natural gas will become more scarce and expensive. The only question is what comes next.

12

GHOST RIDIN’ GRANDPA

In July 2007 Brian Smiley uploaded a two-minute video of his grandparents to YouTube. As it begins, his seventy-seven-year-old grandfather, dressed in a red, white, and blue shirt with stars and stripes, sits in the passenger seat of a car. He turns to his wife and asks, “Well, Grandma, what’s on our schedule today?”

“Well, it’s pretty much open,” she responds. “What do you think we should do?”

Jangly country guitar music plays in the background.

“I’m fresh out of ideas. You don’t have any ideas?” he asks, looking bored.

“Well, there’s one thing we could do,” she says. The music ends with the sound of the needle being ripped off vinyl. She turns to her husband, her mouth drops open in excitement, and says, “We could ghost ride the whip.”

A rap song begins with a thumping, distorted bass line. Smiley’s grandparents dance in the street on both sides of the canary yellow car as it rolls driverless down a street bordered by towering pine trees. The grandfather wears sunglasses and some sort of a doo-rag on his head. For the next minute, the couple dances as the car continues to roll forward. He puts his hands on his knees for an improbable few seconds of the Charleston. She grabs the hood and kicks her feet out. It is a suburban send-up of a dangerous Bay Area tradition.

The clip went viral. It had one million views in a year and another million the next year. I first saw it when a Houston energy investment bank included a link to it in an email to clients and reporters. The bank noted that the man was none other than Dr. Claude E. Cooke Jr., a “legend of hydraulic fracturing.” I met Cooke a couple years later, after he’d called me to talk about fracking. After a couple meetings, in which he wore immaculately pressed Oxford shirts, it occurred to me that he was the grandfather in the “Ghost Ridin’ Grandma” YouTube clip.

I watched the video again, amused by this strange connection. His claim that he was fresh out of ideas couldn’t be further from reality. Cooke has two dozen patents. Even in his ninth decade, he is filing new ones. This man, who had achieved a level of Internet fame alongside cute piano-playing cats and teenage skateboarders with questionable judgment, is an industry legend. In 2006 the Society of Petroleum Engineers honored nine men (they were all men) as “Legends of Hydraulic Fracturing” for seminal innovations. While most of the honorees had a single contribution, Cooke had three.

When Cooke first called me, he wanted to talk about how to build a better well. Fear that fracking itself could contaminate water, he argued, was misplaced. The cracking of shale generally takes place a mile or two underground and thousands of feet below freshwater aquifers. Getting to that rock, however, means drilling a long hole in the ground. A slow migration up through rock strata that would take thousands or millions of years can occur in minutes through a well. In its search for hydrocarbons, the industry builds superhighways that traverse geologic epochs. Worry about the wells, he said, not fracking.

A couple weeks after our first phone conversation, we met in his office in Conroe, Texas, a few stops on the interstate north of downtown Houston and near George Mitchell’s Woodlands development. On the walls are black-and-white photographs of a 1970s frack job in the Texas panhandle. The photos show Halliburton and Exxon engineers studying a pressure gauge that looks like an old-fashioned Hollywood movie camera. A young Cooke stands in the middle of the pack of engineers. “If there is a problem, the issue is well integrity,” he explained, fixing me with a hard stare through wire-frame glasses. If something goes wrong with a fracked well, the likely problem is faulty cement. Cooke said that people concerned about fracking were trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist and ignoring the problem of poorly built wells that was staring them right in the face. If the industry built better wells, he said, you could eliminate problems with water contamination.

The purpose of a well is to reach deep into the earth and suck out long-buried oil and gas. But wells must also be constructed to prevent unintended movement of salty water or contaminants. The industry takes many steps to make sure that the open hole it has drilled is contained, constricted, checked, and controlled. It inserts steel pipe, called casing, into the open holes and locks it into place. Then it pumps in cement to secure the pipes and achieve “zonal isolation.” This is industry jargon, he said, for keeping the gas, or salty water, in one rock from flowing into another. The cement may sound mundane, but it is big business in the oil fields. The energy industry spends about $105 billion annually to extract energy from North America using hydraulic fracturing. About $5 billion of the $105 billion outlay is spent on cementing. This is not off-the-shelf cement found at Home Depot. The oil industry uses an extensive selection of densities, additives, and ingredients. A standard guide to oil-field cementing runs 171 pages.

How many wells have been constructed to withstand a lifetime in the earth? How many have effectively created a single pathway for oil and gas to flow up the inside the casing? And how many have left channels and holes in the cement outside the pipes? Considering how important these questions are, there are no satisfying answers. There is a subsubspecialty of oil-field services called, prosaically, cement evaluation. Only a tiny fraction of the $5 billion spent on cementing is used to evaluate the cement itself.

There are engineers and executives in the industry who share Cooke’s view of the importance of building wells right. So does Mark Zoback, a Stanford University geophysicist who served on the US Energy Department committee that studied shale production. To eliminate risks, he told me, “There are three keys—and those are well construction, well construction, and well construction.” Industry studies and experts concur that cement in wells fails regularly to one degree or another, although rarely catastrophically. The failures tend to be small and subtle but significant enough over time to cause problems. Gas seeping through faulty cement can get into shallow aquifers, infusing them with high levels of methane. Residential water wells that tap these aquifers can pump flammable gas up into homes. Usually, regulators will shut down the well and require the home to use water from refillable plastic “buffaloes” that sit outside the home. Sometimes, expensive ventilation pipes and filtration systems can restore potable water. In other cases, the well is lost, rendering the home uninhabitable. This is what happened in 2010 in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. State investigators found “improper” cementing and well construction. Chesapeake, the driller, paid a record fine to the state. Later, after a lawsuit, it bought out the homes of sixteen families, who moved elsewhere.

Toward the end of my first meeting with Cooke, I asked him what he would demand if he owned land and leased it to be drilled. “Well, I would be pretty sticky about it,” he responded. He said he would demand proof that neither gas nor liquids were flowing through the cement that encircled the steel pipe. I asked how he would do that. He stood up and walked to his door and politely asked his assistant to bring a two-page printout of his patents and publications. She came in and gave him the document, which he passed to me. “You see number ten?” he asked. I looked at the printout and saw a reference to a 1979 paper from the
Journal of Petroleum Technology
. It described a “new tool for detecting and treating flow” in the cement. “I would tell them, ‘I want you to run that tool in the well,’ ” he said.

There was only one problem. The tool—his creation—wasn’t available anymore. It had disappeared from the market. Cooke then told me he was thinking of trying to bring it back.