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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

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.

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.