The Boom (8 page)

“Blender, blender, are you ready?” Henderson calls out into his mouthpiece. “Thank you.”

“Chem ad, ready to roll? Sand guys, is everything in place? Know which one you’re coming out of?” A pause. “Okay. Good.” The sun has set. Outside, the wind knocks a halogen floodlight from its stand, leaving it dangling by its cord twenty feet up in the air. With each gust, the light sways back and forth, and shadows dance around the well.

Henderson absentmindedly fingers the side of his computer monitor, which displays a grid of boxes six across and nine deep. The boxes record different measurements, such as pressure, pH balance, and volume. Each box has its own eye-pounding color combination: green lettering on a brown background, yellow on blue, white on pink, black on orange.

He speaks to the workers in the van. “Okay, everyone in position. Ready to go?” There are murmurs of assent.

A small, heavy black ball, less than an inch in diameter, is taken out of an orange container. It feels surprisingly heavy in the hand, like a piece of a meteor. It is measured with calipers to ensure it was the right size, and then handed to a worker who walks it outside to a set of valves near where the main four-inch steel pipeline angles off the ground and climbs a dozen feet before turning and heading down into the top of the well. The worker holds up the ball and puts it into a large opening. He screws a top onto the opening and then turns a yellow handle. The ball begins a two-minute journey to the bottom of the well, riding on a plume of thick gel. When it arrives near the end of the well, it wedges into a small baffle inside the pipe. The force of the liquid behind the ball slides open a sleeve, sealing off the rest of the well and opening several small holes. The liquid rushes through the holes and hits the Bakken, beginning the process of cracking the oil-rich shale.

Forcing liquid under extraordinary pressure into the Bakken is the raison d’être of this operation. It is why Marathon invested $9 million on the Irene Kovaloff and why men are working through the cold North Dakota night. It is why a twenty-thousand-foot hole has been drilled under the rolling hills covered with sunflower farms and cattle-grazing land. It is why thousands of men, and a few women, have migrated to this corner of the country. There is oil here—oil that will be taken to a refinery on a peninsula north of Seattle and others strung along the Texas Gulf Coast and even on the East Coast. The refineries will heat up the crude in pressurized vessels, and then break up the long strings of hydrogen and carbon molecules into smaller pieces. These pieces have recognizable names (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, propane) and some less familiar names (naphtha) that are octane additives. The crude from the Irene Kovaloff will flow through a labyrinthine industrial system: well to storage tanks to pipelines to crude rail cars to refineries to more pipelines to bulk gasoline distributors to convenience stores to car tanks.

The Irene Kovaloff is a small part of an enormous change in the United States’s relationship with oil. After World War II, inexpensive oil fed an economy that roared. Affordable fuel is why America built the interstate highway system and the suburbs. Travel boomed on the back of gasoline. Route 66 wouldn’t have been built, much less become iconic, if only a few could afford to drive its long stretches. The United States became an enormous consumer of oil, and also one of the world’s largest oil producers. In late 1970 ten million barrels a day came from US wells. And then began a period of long, slow decline. But consumption didn’t slow. It kept increasing. Rising imports made up the difference. Tankers full of crude arrived at the then-new Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, America’s single largest point of entry for crude. Deepwater tankers idled a few miles off the coast and unloaded the cargos into floating buoys connected to pipelines. Within a few years, more than five million barrels a day of OPEC crude was imported into the United States. In 1973 surging fuel costs led to the first “oil shock,” a period when geopolitical disputes cut off supplies and global economic growth was clipped by pricey oil. This pattern of a strong economy leading to high oil prices that, in turn, contributed to recessions repeated in 1979, 2001, and 2008. Expensive foreign oil has long been a brake on the economy. In 1973 President Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, an effort to eliminate dependence on foreign energy by 1980. Project Independence failed. By the end of the decade, imports from overseas had nearly doubled.

“I’ve been in this business forty-three years, and this is the biggest change in my career,” observed Bill Klesse, chairman and chief executive of Valero Energy, the largest refiner in the United States. Reliance on overseas crude is plummeting, he said. Part of the reason is that cars are getting more fuel efficient and using more biofuels. A bigger part of the equation is that America and Canada are generating a lot more crude oil. Sitting in his office in San Antonio, Texas, Klesse explained that he was retooling his refineries to run on crude from Texas and North Dakota and importing less from Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. “If you said three years ago that North America could be oil self-sufficient, it was a joke,” he said. “But now, it’s very real.”

The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based energy watchdog and forecaster funded by the world’s industrialized nations, believes this shift is just beginning. It predicts that by 2020, US oil production will grow to an all-time high of 11.1 million barrels a day. Around that date, America would surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Canadian crude output also grows quickly in the forecast. As that happens, LOOP will have fewer visitors. By 2030, North America could become an oil exporter. Of course, these kinds of predictions are often wrong. But the Irene Kovaloff—and thousands of other wells like it—are at the forefront of a major geopolitical change. For generations, US foreign policy aimed to keep the spigots flowing overseas and the channels of oil delivery unimpeded by foreign potentates. As the ball traveled through the Irene Kovaloff well, speeding its way to the Bakken, all of these foreign entanglements seem less pressing.

The hydraulic heart of fracking is the liquid pumped into the well. Almost all of it is water: snowmelt from the upper Rockies that flows into the Missouri River and into the giant Lake Sakakawea Reservoir. From there, local distribution companies pump it about the state, and oil companies buy it by the millions of gallons. By the time these companies inject it into the well, it doesn’t look like river water. It looks like gelatinous glop. In the Bakken and elsewhere, companies transform the water into a highly engineered viscous liquid designed to carry sand deep into the new fractures. As it heats up underground, the gel reverts to a watery state. This change allows the sand to drop out and remain in the fractures, holding them open like pillars in a coal mine. The water flows back out.

Bobby Kinsey, a fluid technician at the Irene Kovaloff, oversees this alchemic transformation. He works in a cramped lab van that looks like a mobile high school chemistry classroom. An open plastic tub of potato salad and a Dr Pepper sit near his computer. To test the frack liquid, Kinsey pours a few ounces of water into a kitchen blender attached to a large plate-sized dial that controls the speed of the blades. He turns the dial, and the water begins to churn. He picks up two small syringes with liquefied guar—a bean grown in India and used extensively by McDonald’s to thicken its shakes—mixed with diesel fuel. In 2012 demand for guar rose and, coupled with a dry growing season in India, created a temporary shortage. Dave Lesar, chief executive of Halliburton, a global oil-field services company based in Houston, promised his customers that there would be no disruptions, however, because the company had created a “strategic guar reserve.” Halliburton and others are developing a synthetic guar alternative so that the rainy season in India never threatens fracking again.

Halliburton has also created a frack fluid that it says contains ingredients sourced entirely from the food industry. Colorado’s governor, John Hickenlooper, said he “took a swig” of it, as did Lesar, in a meeting in November 2011. “It was not terribly tasty,” Hickenlooper, a former oil industry geologist turned brewpub owner, told a US Senate committee, “but I’m still alive.” On its website, Halliburton warns against quaffing its “CleanStim” product.

Marathon is not using this new frack fluid for the Irene Kovaloff. In the lab van, Kinsey squeezes out a few drops into the blender and lets the mixture churn for three minutes. The liquid in the blender soon has the consistency and color of watery milk.

The next ingredient is a few drops from a plastic bottle marked “Buffer.” I ask what a buffer is. He says he isn’t sure. A quick search for the material safety data sheet, a federally required binder of paper that must be nearby whenever potentially hazardous substances are used, yields nothing. He digs deeper through a cabinet and finds some information. “A proprietary blend of inorganic salts,” says Kinsey, a beefy thirty-year-old with close-cropped hair. He used to build custom houses in the Seattle suburbs, not mix up batches of frack fluid. The 2008 housing market collapse left him without work. He found a classified ad for Bakken jobs on Craigslist. “Washington’s economy sucked, so I ended up out here,” he says.

The next two ingredients are mysteriously labeled syringes marked “30AG” and “32.” Kinsey shrugs when I ask what they were. Researching them later, I discovered that the first is similar to the fuel used in camping stoves. The other is a mixture of boric acid and methanol. Kinsey puts in a few drops and lets it mix together. The liquid was gooey and pale yellow. He pours it out of the blender into a plastic cup and frowns. It is too cold, not at all like the sweltering conditions expected two miles underground, and the desired chemical reactions aren’t taking place. He pops the cup into a microwave oven. After nearly a minute, the microwave dings, and he takes out the fluid and begins to pour it from one cup to the next. A tongue of the gel inches out of the first cup. He flicks his wrist expertly, and the gel jumps back into the cup. He tilts the cup, and the tongue reappears. It plops into the other cup in a large blob. Kinsey has mixed up a batch of what looks like Slime, the 1970s toy sold in small green plastic trash cans that children let ooze through their fingers.

During the frack job, workers add other chemicals to the gel. Several large vats of chemicals are in an adjacent truck. The air inside has a sweet, acrid scent. The chemicals include biocides to kill any unwanted microbes that could eat away at the gel, surfactants to make the liquid slippery so it doesn’t generate too much friction on the way down the well, and inhibiting agents to prevent minerals from building up. Water and guar make up about 99.1 percent of the liquid; the chemicals are the rest. Even in such small concentrations, the volume of chemicals can add up because the Irene Kovaloff requires so much liquid. A laundry list includes 98 gallons of phosphonic acids, 118 gallons of magnesium hydroxide, and 138 gallons of 2-butoxyethanol, a compound used mostly by dry cleaners and paint manufacturers. Kinsey mixes up small batches to make sure the liquid is gelling properly. Outside his van, large spinning industrial paddles mix the chemicals, guar, and water together. It is carried through thick but flexible black pipes onto fifty-foot-long trucks. There the mixture flows into a machine that resembles a large truck engine. A crankshaft turns five plungers that suck up the fluid into a chamber and expel it. Every valve and every inch of steel are potential weak links. Pipes have color-coded bands indicating when they were last inspected. One fatigued connection, and frack fluid can end up spraying all over the pad—or an untethered, flailing pipe can kill a worker. Oil-field hands tend to be superstitious. The well head is a ten-foot-tall stack of red valves. Inside are several small brass gaskets, each with a pin-sized hole. Oil-field custom requires these holes all point north. “If they’re all facing south,” says Byington, “we oughta just drive off location now.” He wasn’t joking.

The current Bakken boom began on September 7, 2008, the day the US housing market crashed and a deep economic recession began. That day, a blue and white drilling rig broke ground on a well at noon. A couple hours before Brigham Exploration began to drill the Olson 10-15 #1H, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called an unusual Sunday-morning press conference to announce that the federal government was taking control of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Investment banking giant Lehman Brothers would file for bankruptcy a week later. “That was the financial crisis, and it was scary times,” said Bud Brigham, the chief executive and founder of the company. Completing the well would drain precious resources. He wasn’t sure if there would be any more money to keep going.