The Boom (45 page)

Houston: James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, 2011.

Sinclair, Upton.

. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

Singer, Mark.

. New York: Knopf, 1985.

I relied on several sources for the history of Burkburnett, Texas. These included three books, cited below, as well as an oral history of Walter Cline in the University of Texas’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Pioneers in Texas Oil archive, and the Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/heb14) entry on Burkburnett, last accessed October 2013.

Details about Ottis Grimes came from court decisions in the case. The 78th District Court in Wichita Falls, Texas, was kind enough to pull the original case file and send me a copy. This is the source of the “commonly sustained” quote. Another particularly helpful source was the Court of Civil Appeals (Fort Worth, Texas) decision in
Grimes v. Goodman Drilling Co., et al.
(no. 9213), issued June 14, 1919, and cited in the
Southwestern Reporter,
vol. 216 (St. Paul: West, 1920), 202–4. The Barney Fudge quote is from an interview with the author. For a modern example of homeowners without mineral rights fighting oil companies, see the
Ruggiero v. Aruba Petroleum
lawsuit, 271st Judicial Court (Wise County, Texas).

The Rex Tillerson quote is from a transcript of his meeting with the
Wall Street Journal
editorial board that was provided to me by Exxon and used by permission. A partial quote first appeared in an article I cowrote that appeared in the December 3, 2012, edition of the
Wall Street Journal:
“Global Gas Push Stalls—Firms Hit Hurdles Trying to Replicate U.S. Success Abroad.”

The quote from Shell’s Peter Voser was in an October 2012 interview with the author. John Tintera’s reflections on his tenure at the Texas Railroad Commission are from a panel discussion convened by the Alaska Oil & Gas Congress and quoted in a September 22, 2013, post by Starr Spencer in Platts’s
The Barrel
blog. The Emily Krafjack quotes are from an interview with the author, as is the “industry has done a great job of figuring out how to crack the code” quote from Mark Boling. The data on job growth is from Stephen P. A. Brown and Mine K. Yücel’s
The Shale Gas and Tight Oil Boom: U.S. States’ Economic Gains and Vulnerabilities,
a Council on Foreign Relations report from October 2013. The sausage quote was cited in a
Charleston Gazette
article from March 22, 2012, “Gas Drilling Needs to Improve, Chesapeake Official Says,” by Ken Ward Jr.

I referred to studies in Pennsylvania, conducted near my parents’ property, that looked at the potential for fracking to create pathways for briny water and chemicals to migrate upward into shallow aquifers. These are the Warner and Osborn papers cited below. The “unlikely” quote is from the 2011 paper and was repeated in the 2012 Warner paper. The use and problems of sewage plants to clean up flowback water is from the 2013 Warner paper, cited below, and correspondence with coauthor Robert Jackson.

The Ernest Moniz quote is from his July 2011 testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and also from a speech he gave, which I attended, in December 2012 at the University of Texas. The Energy Information Administration provided information about Texas and North Dakota crude oil production.

Data on Nigerian oil imports to the United States comes from the US Energy Information Administration’s “U.S. Imports by Country of Origin.” The IEA also provides statistics on the nation’s output since 1980. I derived the value of its oil output from these data.

There have been several studies examining how renewable and gas generation can coexist. The study I relied on is titled “Partnering Natural Gas and Renewables in ERCOT,” carried out by the Brattle Group for the Texas Clean Energy Coalition and was published in June 2013. While a bit technical, it is the most thorough examination of how the power grid currently mixes various generation sources.

A basic overview of the fracking process can be found in two Society of Petroleum Engineers papers by George E. King, who was also generous with his time. The same can be said for Stanford University professor Mark Zoback, who has also given several lectures on fracking that are available online. The quote in this chapter is from a symposium on October 5, 2011.

The rapid growth of shale gas production comes from
The Shale Revolution,
an extensive research report for investors from Credit Suisse and issued on December 13, 2012. It uses cubic meters, which I converted to cubic feet using a 1:35 ratio. I calculated wind’s contributions to US power generation using the Energy Information Administration’s
Electric Power Monthly
data, comparing trailing twelve-month data from July 2013 to annual data from 2003.

The nonprofit online news operation ProPublica has tracked spending by state regulators. Its February 2013 report on the subject, “State Oil and Gas Regulators Still Spread Thin,” has useful data on the topic. It can be found at www.propublica.org/article/update-state-oil-and-gas-regulators-still-spread-thin. (Last accessed August 2013.)

Graf, Edwin A. “Reasonable Use—Determination Whether a Land Use by a Mineral Lessee is Reasonably Necessary Requires Consideration of Alternate Methods of Development Available to a Lessee and a Surface Owner.”

50 (April 1972): 806–813.

House, Boyce.

Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1941.

King, George E. “Thirty Years of Gas Shale Fracturing: What Have We Learned?” Paper presented at SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Florence, Italy, September 19–22, 2010.

———. “Hydraulic Fracturing 101: What Every Representative, Environmentalist, Regulator, Reporter, Investor, University Researcher, Neighbor and Engineer Should Know About Estimating Frac Risk and Improving Frac Performance in Unconventional Gas and Oil Wells.” Paper presented at SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference, the Woodlands, Texas, February 6–8, 2012.

Landrum, Jeff.

Burkburnett, TX: Self-published, 1982.

Osborn, Stephen G., Avner Vengosh, Nathaniel R. Warner, and Robert B. Jackson. “Methane Contamination of Drinking Water Accompanying Gas-Well Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing.”

108, no. 20 (May 17, 2011): 8172–76.

Vallon, Dick.

Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Co. Publishers, 2007.

Warner, Nathaniel R., Robert B. Jackson, Thomas H. Darrah et al. “Geo—chemical Evidence for Possible Natural Migration of Marcellus Formation Brine to Shallow Aquifers in Pennsylvania.”

of the United States of America 109, no. 30 (July 24, 2012): 11961–66.

———. “Reply to Engelder: Potential for Fluid Migration from the Marcellus Formation Remains Possible.”

of the United States of America 109, no. 52 (December 26, 2012): E3626.

Warner, Nathaniel R., Cidney A. Christie, Robert B. Jackson, and Avner Vengosh. “Impacts of Shale Gas Wastewater Disposal on Water Quality in Western Pennsylvania.

Published online September 2013.

Marathon Oil, and in particular, Pat Tschacher and John Porretto, made it possible for me to visit the Irene Kovaloff well. Additionally, Lance Langford at Statoil and Bud Brigham helped me understand what the Bakken was all about. Travis Kelly, of Target Logistics, gave me a tour of one of his company’s man camps and is also the source of the claim that it will soon house one of every one hundred North Dakotans.

The Bill Klesse quote comes from an interview with the author on August 20, 2012. Details of North Dakota oil production come from both the EIA and the
Director’s Cut
, a monthly publication of data from Lynn Helms, director of the Oil and Gas Division at the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. In an August 2010 presentation, the department estimated that there would be twenty thousand Bakken wells. By late 2012, it was estimating forty-five thousand, according to a conversation with Alison Ritter, a department spokeswoman. Further information on global and US oil production, and import and export levels, comes from both the IEA and EIA, in particular the EIA’s data files with the following source keys: MCRNTUS2, MCRFPUS2 and MCRIMXX2.

I have talked to the estimable Phil Verleger, an energy economist with few peers, for several years, and he was helpful in thinking about the Bakken and its potential impact. The quote in the chapter comes from a conversation and first appeared in a November 17, 2011,
Wall Street Journal
article. He was also a source of my thinking about a long-term link between rising oil prices and economic contraction. In addition, University of California, San Diego, professor James D. Hamilton has written about this.

The quote from Dave Lesar about the “strategic guar reserve” came from a Halliburton conference call with investors on July 23, 2012. The
Denver Business Journal
reported on John Hickenlooper and Lesar drinking frack fluid on March 8, 2012, in a posting on its website titled “Are you drinking the Kool-Aid about fracking fluid?” His testimony to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was on February 12, 2013.

Quotes from Energy Secretary Chu are from a speech at the CERAWeek conference in March 2010, seen by the author. A video of the speech was provided to me by IHS, the parent company of industry consultant CERA. Rex Tillerson talked to the author about his wife’s present in a meeting several years ago at the
Wall Street Journal
. His quote about the hearse he expects to take him to his funeral come from a
Financial Times
article on June 27, 2007, “Exxon Chief Sceptical of Plans to Scale Up Biofuels Production,” by Ed Crooks and Fiona Harvey.

Details about the Olson 10-15H well come from a report by Neset Consulting Service that I found in the North Dakota Industrial Commission, Oil and Gas Division, records in Bismarck, North Dakota. Details about Brigham Exploration’s dire financials come from Bud Brigham and are reported in the 10-K filed by the company on March 13, 2009.

I determined average wages by using state US Bureau of Labor Statistics data and was guided by Michael Ziesch, manager of the Labor Market Information Center of Job Service North Dakota.

Details on the preliminary production of the Irene Kovaloff provided by Marathon Oil.

Hamilton, James D. “Oil and the Macroeconomy Since World War II.”

91, no. 2 (April 1983): 228–48.

———. “Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007–08.”

(Spring 2009): 215–59.

Nordeng, Stephan. “A Brief History of Oil Production from the Bakken Formation in the Williston Basin.”

(January 2010): 5.

Rankin, R., M. Thibodeau, M. C. Vincent, and T. T. Palisch. “Improved Production and Profitability Achieved with Superior Completions in Horizontal Wells: A Bakken/Three Forks Case History.” Paper presented at SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, September 19–22, 2010, Florence, Italy.

Sorensen, James A.

. Assessment presented to National Energy Technology Laboratory, Morgantown, WV, 2008.

I relied on many sources for this chapter, the most important of which are listed here. I found information about Edward Roberts in an 1864 edition of
Dental Times: A Quarterly Journal of Dental Science
; see the patent notice on page 180, as well as “Improved Vulcanizing-Machine,” Letters Patent 37,523 (January 27, 1863), and “Improvement in Apparatus for Vulcanizing Rubber, &c,” Letters Patent 23,948 (dated May 10, 1859.) The torpedo patent is 59,936 (November 20, 1866). His hiring of Pinkerton detectives is from the American Oil & Gas Historical Society’s online article “Shooters—A ‘Fracking’ History” and is available at http://aoghs.org/technology/shooters-well-fracking-history. (Last accessed August 2013.) The description of the “groan like a great monster” is from the February 4, 1865, edition of the
Boston Commercial Bulletin
. Paul Adomites shared with me a prepublication version of his article “The First Frackers—Shooting Oil Wells with Nitroglycerin Torpedoes,” which later appears in
Oil-Industry History
12, no. 1 (December 2011).

Details about acidization and other twentieth-century techniques come from a number of sources, including a November 1938
Popular Mechanics
article, “New Oil Wells from Old Ones,” and, in the magazine’s December 1942 issue, “Bringing Old Oil Wells Back to Life.” The steel shortage and post–World War II oil demand and shortages are described in the February 9, 1948, issue of
Life
in “The U.S. Runs Short of Oil.” The cost of Stanolind’s research center was reported in the February 1953 issue of
Resourceful Oklahoma
, a publication of the Oklahoma Planning and Resources Board. The description of Stanolind’s facility is in “Labs Bring City Annual Payroll of $11 Million,” in the
Tulsa World
, March 8, 1961.