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George Mitchell
He frac'ed, until it paid off


By: Editors of AES
Adapted from:  George Mitchell, Father of Frac'ing
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He was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1919, the son of Greek immigrants, and he died there in July 2013 at age 94, a billionaire. But through the years in between, oh what a life!​
In the gas industry, an exploration area tends to be described as a "play."  In 1981, George Mitchell, one of the most powerful natural-gas barons in Texas, began to look for a play in an unlikely place: the Barnett Shale, a thick layer of rock, thousands of square miles in area, located deep under the land around Fort Worth. For years, oil and gas companies had succeeded in bringing up fuel from above and below the shale. Mitchell decided to drill into the shale and fracture it with highly pressurized fluids, freeing natural gas to be drawn to the surface. "We had people who told us we were nuts,"  Dan Steward, a geologist who helped manage the Barnett project, recalls.  But for George Mitchell, whose North Texas wells were drying up, "this was survival, this was need."
Mitchell did not invent hydraulic fracturing, or fracking; it was first tried in the late 1940s and helped along by Department of Energy research in the 1970s. Before Mitchell, however, fracking had not been used commercially to free natural gas from shale. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Mitchell Energy drilled well after well, many of whose sites were determined personally by Mitchell, an expert geologist who dropped by his company's engineering department daily to check for good news. For 15 years, the company struggled to show that its fracking could produce reliable and economical gas. At one point in the late 1990s, his son Todd recalls, Mitchell expressed incredulity that a few upstarts in Silicon Valley could write a software program and sell their company for a billion dollars. That was nearly the value of Mitchell Energy at the time, a company with some 2,000 employees, vast land holdings - and an uncertain future.
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In 1997, one of Mitchell's shale gas wells, aided by the injection of a water, sand and chemical mixture (rather than more expensive foams and gels), established that fracking could prove financially viable over the long term. Not long after, Mitchell sold his company for $3.5 billion. By then, fracking was on its way to resurrecting America's oil-and-gas industry. New horizontal drilling techniques made shale gas wells even more productive, and by 2012, shale gas accounted for about 35 percent of the country's natural-gas production. Daniel Yergin, the oil-industry analyst and historian, says Mitchell's fracking technique is so far the most important, and the biggest, energy innovation of this century. It is also the most environmentally controversial.
​“'We can frac safely if we frac sensibly.'

That may not make for a great bumper sticker. It does make for good environmental and economic policy.”
​- George Mitchell

What many forget however, is that Mitchell understood better than most that fracking was both a blessing and a curse.  In August 2012, Mitchell and coauthor New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg published an op-ed in the Washington Post that defended the safety and efficacy of hydraulic fracturing. But true to his own environmental activism, in this same article Mitchell urged the industry to adopt and adhere to best practices: “Fracing for natural gas can be as good for our environment as it is for our economy and our wallets, but only if done responsibly. The rapid expansion of fracing has invited legitimate concerns about its impact on water, air, and climate – concerns that industry has attempted to gloss over. With so much at stake for the environment, jobs, and energy security, it is critical that we make reasoned decisions about how to manage the use of hydraulic fracturing technology.
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  • Members Login >>
    • Energy Today Archive >
      • Leading Change
      • Zero Emissions
      • Interactive Map
      • Floating Wind
      • Quick Hits
      • Steven Chu
      • Dan Poneman
      • Melanie Kenderdine
      • Chris Gould
      • UNSDSN
      • Data as a Tool
      • Change Through Organizing
      • MK Dorsey
      • Social Impact Start-Ups
      • Social Impact Entrepreneurs
      • A Network for the Heartland
      • Ecosystem Maps
      • Clean Energy By 2035
      • Bioremediation
      • Energy Storage-Video
      • Geothermal Energy
      • Commodity Chemical
      • PM Careers In Cleantech
      • Critical Breakthroughs
      • Losing Our Way
      • The Third Rail
      • Mapping the Seas
      • Low-Carbon Midwest
      • Smart Grid
      • Decarbonization
      • Getting to Zero
      • Climate Risk and Response
      • Our Infrastructure Is Being Built For a Climate That's Already Gone
      • Energy History
      • Battery Recycling
      • Quantum Waves
      • Coal REE
      • Fueling Big Rigs
      • Sandia Initiatives
      • Natural Gas Revolution
      • Duck Chart
      • Carbon Crossroads
      • Electric Cars
      • Energy Jobs Coalition
      • Indispensable Electricity
      • Post-Pandemic Predictions
      • Building Infrastructure
      • De-Prioritizing Cars
      • Vicki Hollub
      • Emily Kirsch
      • Lise Meitner
      • Lets Listen
      • COVID-19 and China Air
      • COVID-19 and Oil
      • COVID-19 and Solar
      • COVID-19 and Storage
      • Immorality of Waste
      • Rethinking "Disposable"
      • Second Life of Wind Turbines
      • Rare Earth Elements
      • Coal: Ashes to REM
      • Platinum and Cobalt
      • Geoengineering the Planet
      • An Atmospheric Industry
      • L.A. Hydrogen Plant
      • Pebbles, Sponges and Fans
      • CO2 Into Fuel
      • Superpower
      • The Fate of Food
      • Power Trip
      • Signs on the Earth
      • The Dreamt Land
      • Double Jeopardy
      • 7 Trends In Mineral Mining
      • The Prize - an excerpt
      • REM From Coal
      • The Deep Sea - The Next Gold Rush
      • Geothermal - Salvation or Earthquakes
      • The Myth of the Sustainabie City
      • The Emerging Circular Economy
      • How Cities Can Become More Resilient
      • Prosperity for One, Disaster for Another
      • The Real Energy Revolution
      • Carbon Loophole
      • Op-Ed: CO2 Reduction Thru Biofuels
      • The Sun Also Accelerates
      • Blowing Past the Zettabyte Era
      • Jack Voltaic: A Cyber Simulation Wargame
      • Managing Risk
      • From Russia, With Love
      • Ukraine: The Cyber-War Test Bed
      • 5G Requires A New Approach
      • Climate Change or Just Weather
      • Gone
      • Surge Flooding - Houston
      • Tug of War: Pollution Masks Impact of Climate Change
      • Climate Change Needs the Humanities
      • Nuclear Power: A Dilemma for Climate Change Philanthropy
      • Did California Trump the Clean Air Rollback
      • A Redundancy Dilemma
      • Double Jeopardy - a bonus excerpt
      • The War of the Currents
      • There Will Be Buyouts
      • Space Research Can Save the Planet
      • California's Oil Hypocrisy
      • Robert Merton
      • Africa: The New O&G Frontier
      • Why Oil Markets Aren't Reacting
      • Capitalism and Climate Change
      • The Frackers
      • Double Jeopardy
      • The Grid
      • Designing Climate Solutions
      • Making Tech Miracles
      • Best In Snow
      • Plastic Do-Over
      • The New Nuclear
      • Global Energy Insecurity
      • Renewable Energy and Geopolitics
      • The Myth of Energy Security
      • Residential Storage Security
      • An Insecure GND
      • Water, Food and Energy Security
      • The Transformation of the O&G Sector
      • Wild Fire
      • Ocean Pollution At High-Tide
      • CC's Fuzzy Math
      • A Climate Casualty of a Different Kind
      • Plants Store CO2 Too
      • 45Q for CarbonTech
      • CC's Potential Pitfalls
      • Klaus’s wacky idea
      • Permitting Geological Sequestration
      • A New Era of Energy Innovation
      • Investment in O&G Set to Soar
      • Old Capital Strategies, New Thinking
      • BofA Builds Green Revolution
      • We'd Rather Quit OPEC...
      • One Belt, One Road, No Plan
      • Coal fight turns ugly
      • As the World Warms
      • Oil Diplomacy
      • George Mitchell
      • Nicole Poindexter
      • Dan Kammen
      • Regina Mayor
      • Jessica Matthews
      • Bonus: Refining Reducing
      • Bonus: Energy Investment Trends
      • Bonus: The US has lost the rare earths
      • Bonus: Fossil-tech survey results
      • Bonus article: The New Age of Electricity
      • Bonus - Plan B: Geoengineering
      • Bonus: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - Fossil-Tech
      • Bonus: Cyber Attack Timeline
      • Bonus: Employees - Cyber Threats and Assets
      • Bonus: Transportation, Jetson's Style
      • Bonus Article for Members
      • Bonus article - Infrastructure Failure
      • Bonus: Hydrogen Fuel From Coal
      • Bonus: Cities Not Meeting Targets
      • Bonus: Carbon Sequestering Fungi
      • Bonus: The Earthshot Prize
      • Bonus: A Radioactive Discovery