The Boom (9 page)

Before 2008, there were a lot of experiments attempting to frack long horizontal wells. Typically, energy companies pumped frack fluid into a mile-long section of a horizontal well and hoped it would push into a small existing crack in the rock. It was like bringing a chainsaw into a surgical suite. The technique was known in North Dakota oil circles as a “Hail Mary frack.” It didn’t work. Brigham tried several of these fracks and made wells that produced just two hundred barrels of crude oil a day; not enough to justify the expense. A different company, EOG Resources, introduced swell packers to North Dakota around 2004. These rubbery membranes attach to the outside of pipes inside a well. When oil hits the packers, they swell up and seal off sections of the well. These spelled the end of the Hail Mary frack. With swell packers, EOG could slice up the five-thousand-foot horizontal leg of a well into six or eight distinct sections, allowing the frack to more effectively deliver rock-cracking pressure to a six-hundred-foot slab of rock. This technique created large, economical wells in Mountrail County, where geological conditions held large stores of oil. Turning the Bakken into a giant oil field—spanning an area only slightly smaller than California and covering parts of two states and two Canadian provinces—required more innovation.

In September 2008 Brigham Exploration gambled on the Olson well. It drilled a ten-thousand-foot horizontal leg and decided to try creating twenty distinct frack stages, slicing up the well into sections. Brigham’s engineers were now trying to bring surgical tools into the operating room. But they needed to push swell packers and fracturing equipment to the very bottom of the well, including through the nearly two-mile-long horizontal lateral. No one had ever attempted to do this before. If the tools got stuck in the well, Brigham would have created an $8 million clogged pipe. The company attached metal cups to the outside of the long, slender tools and pumped in water to propel the tools to the end of the well; the concept is similar to how wind catches a boat’s sails. Brigham’s financially precarious situation drove it. The company ended 2008 $300 million in debt. The total value of its shares was less than $60 million. Prospects for borrowing more money weren’t good, and as the well was drilled, Wall Street essentially closed its lending window amid the growing financial collapse. The company’s best shot for getting more money would be to show that it had hit on a way to drill better wells. Or more precisely, that it had found a more economical approach to producing oil.

The drilling of the well continued through the North Dakota winter and into early 2009. Temperatures dropped to 30 degrees below zero. There were four feet of snow on the ground, recalled Russ Rankin, a Brigham engineer. Motors on the drilling rig that were shut off for even a couple hours froze up and needed to be replaced. Despite the conditions, Brigham managed to force the tools into the well with few problems and fracked the well twenty times. By late January 2009, it was time to pull out all the tools and see if oil flowed from the rock.

Bud Brigham, who grew up in the West Texas oil patch but set up his company in the hills surrounding Austin, sat in his office nervously waiting for word. When the call came in, the news was better than good. It was stupendous. The Olson was flowing at a daily rate of 1,100 barrels, plus another 1.3 million cubic feet of gas. Brigham was exhilarated. “That is one of the wonderful things about the oil business,” he said. “It still has the romance and the excitement. On the one hand, you have the risk of failure, and on the other hand, you have the jubilation of success.”

The Olson well was easily twice as expensive as the type of Hail Mary wells Brigham had tried a few years earlier. But the well produced nearly five times more oil. In 2006 it cost Brigham about $40 for each barrel of oil it pulled from its Bakken wells. Three years later, with swell packers and precision fracks, Brigham’s engineers had driven down the cost per barrel to below $16. What’s more, the Hail Mary wells yielded about 110,000 barrels over their operating life. By 2009, wells using the new twenty-stage fracks—in the same places and from the same Bakken rocks—were generating about 500,000 barrels. By driving down the cost per barrel, Brigham expanded the number of wells that could be drilled profitably in the Bakken. A few years ago, five thousand Bakken wells in North Dakota alone was a dream. As Brigham and others drilled more wells using the Olson as a template, the state predicted in 2010 that there would be twenty thousand wells drilled over the next two decades. Within a couple years, it had more than doubled that estimate. Predicting the future of oil production is a tricky business. The giddiness of a boom can lead to exaggeration. Much could derail the Bakken’s growth, such as falling oil prices, rising costs, and inferior rock quality as drilling expands farther out toward the edges. But regardless, the Bakken is the largest oil field found in the United States for decades.

The industry has kept innovating. Brigham added frack stages, eventually reaching forty for each well. With fracks at closer intervals, more of the Bakken’s oil drained out. Other companies followed Brigham’s lead. In 2011, three years after tiny Brigham flirted with financial end days, Norwegian oil giant Statoil bought it for $4.4 billion. (Bud Brigham owned about 2 percent of the outstanding shares.) By then, other oil shales had been discovered, including the giant Eagle Ford oil field in South Texas. And if fracking could unlock the oil in these areas, it could do the same around the world. Argentina, Russia, and the Middle East are all believed to have vast oil deposits in shales. In the mid-2000s, fears of “peak oil” were rife. The Olson 10-15 helped change the narrative. Crude remains a complex and constrained global market. Even if a dozen new Bakkens are discovered on the Great Plains, global oil prices are unlikely to budge much. But Brigham in the Bakken reinforced the notion that the industry could sink its drill bits into more oil than even the most dewy-eyed wildcatters had dreamed possible.

And the industry has just begun to exploit the Bakken, Brigham said. “We are still in the early innings; we are still pretty brute force at how we break up these rocks,” Brigham explained. The industry estimates that it is getting no more than 10 percent of the oil in the Bakken out with its wells. (Recovery from a conventional reservoir is usually close to 50 percent.) In shales, new technologies will be developed to get an incremental 5 percent out—and then another 5 percent, he predicted. That has been the history of the oil industry, and why competitors trying to make fuels from renewable sources such as algae or agricultural waste tend to slink away in frustration. The oil industry is good at finding new ways to get oil from the ground. It musters enormous budgets and tens of thousands of engineers to the task.

Bud Brigham believes that is how it should be. “When you really analyze it objectively, oil and natural gas are just wonderful energy sources,” he said. “I mean, they are portable. You can put them in tanks, you can put them in pipelines and move them from here to there. And they are cheap, really cheap. It is extremely inexpensive relative to virtually any other energy option, and it’s scalable and it’s portable.” Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a Texan and Ayn Rand aficionado whose wife once gave him a first edition of
Atlas Shrugged
for an anniversary present, made a similar point in 2007, as fear of crude scarcity buoyed government support for alternative, plant-based biofuels. “All I can tell you is [that] in all likelihood, I’ll get driven to my funeral in a hearse that’s using gasoline or diesel,” he said. He was fifty-four years old at the time.

The most compelling case I’ve ever heard for oil—at least for its efficient ability to deliver energy—was delivered by Stephen Chu, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and former US secretary of energy under President Barack Obama. In a 2010 speech to a ballroom full of energy executives in Houston, he laid out his goal for the United States to deliver new, clean energy that mitigated climate change and decreased US dependence on foreign oil. He conceded that it would be tough to knock oil off its perch as the world’s dominant fuel. “Why? Because oil is an ideal transportation fuel,” he said. He showed a graph of energy density per unit of weight and energy density per unit of volume. The most efficient energy sources were diesel, gasoline, and human body fat. “You want to carry your energy in as compact a form as possible. Some more compact than others,” he joked. Chu pointed out where the lithium-ion battery, the heart of modern hybrid and electric cars, was on the graph. To carry a comparable amount of energy, the battery required eighty times more space and weight as gasoline and diesel. His point that day was to emphasize how much work remained on new, clean sources of energy. The assembled executives, more than one thousand of them from all over the globe, smiled quietly in satisfaction. Their product was secure.

There are environmental challenges associated with fracking, as well as with burning oil and natural gas. But there’s a reason why fossil fuels dominate the energy market, why crude oil powers the overwhelming majority of our cars, and why natural gas generates so much of the electricity and heat consumed in the United States. They are good, compact fuels. And with fracking, the industry has entered a new era of plentiful domestic oil and abundant natural gas. Foes of fossil fuels face a revitalized industry.

Bud Brigham founded his eponymous company in 1990 and has lived through the modern history of energy production. “Used to be we’d go drill a wildcat well, one-in-ten chance of success,” he said. In the 1990s he was an early adopter of “three-dimensional seismic,” an oil-field technology that allows drillers to use sound waves to find oil-bearing geologic structures underground. “When 3-D came along in the 1990s, we drilled hundreds of wells with a seventy percent to eighty percent success rate. That was unheard of, to only have twenty percent or so of the wells be dry holes. Now, with this new technology . . . we drilled over a hundred consecutive successful wells in North Dakota—these horizontal, long, lateral, high-frack-stage wells, without a dry one, all commercial, averaging 2,800 barrels a day. I mean, in our business, historically, if someone had come up to you and said you are going to drill over a hundred consecutive wells successfully and they will average 2,800 barrels a day, they would say you’re crazy, that would never happen. And it has happened.”

This string of success is not limited to Brigham. By the time Marathon drilled the Irene Kovaloff in October 2012, it had drilled nearly three hundred wells. Nearly every one found oil. Some were better producers than others, and some suffered from escalating costs that crimped profits. But by fracking the rock, oil flowed from the shale.

As the small black ball descends to the bottom of the well, Sly Henderson keeps a close eye on the gauges and dizzying array of numbers. Mounted on a wall is a white monitor that graphs STP-1, or surface treater pressure—a technical way of saying how much pressure is on the Bakken. The liquid is being pressed against the rock at between seven thousand and eight thousand pounds per square inch. It is more than two hundred times the pressure of air inside a car tire. Sit on the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico’s deepest trench, and the pressure from twelve thousand feet of water above is not equal to the pressure being applied by the frack fluid. When the Bakken gives in to this assault and fractures, fluid will rush into the cracks, creating a momentary drop in pressure.

As Henderson waits for this signal, he cracks open a fresh tin of chewing tobacco. There is a small dip in pressure, but it is only a pocket of gas pushing against the heavy gel before being overcome and forced back into the rock. Afterward, for a minute, the line displaying pressure is flat, like an electrocardiogram of a patient whose heart has stopped. Then, shortly after seven thirty in the evening, comes a small dip in pressure, followed by a spike and another dip. In the span of a few seconds, the small black ball had found its way into its hole and opened the sleeve, exposing small holes through which the frack fluid could exit the pipe and fracture the rock. It looks like the patient’s heart has restarted for a couple beats. The patient is alive. The Bakken has been fracked.

Outside the van, a fine patina of silica dust is blowing. A worker, his mouth covered, uses his hands to keep the sand from spilling off the conveyor belt. Crankshafts spin quickly. Chemicals and water course through dozens of pipes. The frack factory is pumping cacophonously. Inside the van, a second ball is released and a routine established that will continue for the next twenty-nine fracks. Talk turns to college football and how the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the Louisiana State University Tigers are doing. Byington says good night to everyone and heads to his pickup to drive back into town for some sleep. On the drive, he thinks about a coming break. When work on the Kovaloff well is finally finished, he plans to head west to spend time with his family. He also plans to spend a few hours in winter camouflage, hiding behind the rise of a hill, using animal calls to trick coyotes into coming to him and his shotgun.