God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(11)
Before the fracking comes the drilling. In the Barnett, holes go down about six thousand to eight thousand feet, substantially below the water table. Once the desired depth is reached, the drill slowly bends until it becomes horizontal, for as much as another ten thousand feet.
There is a science-fiction quality to the fracking process. Several tubes, called perforating guns, are snaked to the end of the well bore. The guns contain explosives that rupture the surrounding strata. Meanwhile, on the surface, twenty or so trucks line up on either side of the well. Pipes and hoses emanating from the trucks connect to a metal apparatus known as a manifold, which looks like a giant alien insect. A mighty sound suddenly erupts as the trucks begin pumping eight hundred gallons of fluid and proppant a minute into the manifold and down the well, opening up fresh microfractures in the shale. The process is repeated again and again until the entire horizontal plane of the well has been blasted open. It takes about a month to bring a well into production.
The S. H. Griffin No. 4 is in a grassy field inside a cage of chain-link fencing. It looks small and inert on the surface, and few neighbors seem to appreciate its historic significance. Unlike an oil well, there is no pump jack. Instead, the well is capped by what is known in the industry as a “Christmas tree”—a bunch of pipes and valves that control the flow of gas and direct the emissions into olive-green condensate tanks.
On the northern horizon, there was a cloud of black smoke, perhaps from an oil fire or a gas flare.
Fracking is a dark bounty. It has created enormous wealth for some. The flood of natural gas has lowered world energy costs and blunted the influence of traditional oil economies, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. It has also despoiled communities and created enduring environmental hazards. As in many Texas towns where fracked wells have become commonplace, the citizens of DISH were anxious. In 2010, the little town paid $15,000 for an air-quality study. It found elevated amounts of benzene, a carcinogen, and other harmful chemicals, but not at levels that are known to endanger health. “If you drew a circle of a mile around my house, there were probably two hundred wells inside it,” the former mayor, Calvin Tillman, told me. His children started getting nosebleeds when gassy odors were present. “One of my boys got a nosebleed that was all over his hands,” Tillman recalled. “There was blood dripping down the walls. It looked like a murder scene. The next morning my wife said, ‘That’s it.’?” They sold their house at a loss and moved to a community that is not on the Barnett Shale. The nosebleeds went away. (Since then, additional emission controls have been installed on the wells around DISH.)
The frackers advanced fifteen miles northeast, to the city of Denton. It is now thought to be the most heavily fracked city in the country. Wells have been drilled near schools and hospitals, and on the campus of the University of North Texas. In 2008, multiple earthquakes were recorded in the area, and according to a study conducted at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, more than two hundred quakes have followed. The study concluded that the quakes have most likely been caused by the 1.7 billion barrels of wastewater that have been pumped into the region’s 167 “injection” wells, which are used to dispose of fracking fluids. Even after environmental activists recorded twelve earthquakes over a twenty-four-hour period in and around Irving, where ExxonMobil is headquartered, in January 2015, energy executives and state regulators maintained that the earthquakes were a natural phenomenon.
“I started sounding the alarm pretty early,” Sharon Wilson, who once worked in the energy industry, told me. In 2008, she sold the mineral rights on a small horse ranch that she owned in Wise County. “My air turned brown and my water turned black,” she said. “I moved to Denton, thinking that my family would have some level of safety there.” As she was unpacking, she noticed a well being drilled across the street from a nearby city park.
George Mitchell had been reluctant to admit that the fracking revolution that he unleashed had damaging consequences for the environment. “He was caught off guard by the backlash,” his son Todd, a geologist, recalls. Todd informed his father that, although natural gas caused less air pollution than coal, industrial leakages of natural gas—especially of methane, a potent greenhouse gas—could render it no better than coal in terms of global warming. Mitchell also came to appreciate the damage caused by the industrialization of the landscape in communities subjected to intensive drilling. In 2012, the year before he died, he and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg coauthored an op-ed for The Washington Post, arguing for increased regulation. “The rapid expansion of fracking has invited legitimate concerns about its impact on water, air and climate—concerns that the industry has attempted to gloss over,” they wrote. “Safely fracking natural gas can mean healthier communities, a cleaner environment and a reliable domestic energy supply.” Mitchell expressed himself more succinctly to his son-in-law Perry Lorenz, an Austin developer. “These damn cowboys will wreck the world to get an extra one percent” of profit, Mitchell said. “You got to sit on them.” Unfortunately, Mitchell’s plea has gone largely unheeded in Texas.
Sharon Wilson began volunteering in Denton for Earthworks, a national environmental organization with a focus on accountability in the oil and gas industry. Earthworks joined forces with a local organization, the Denton Drilling Awareness Group. Their campaign led, in November 2014, to a ban on fracking in the city limits. “It should send a signal to the industry that if the people in Texas—where fracking was invented—can’t live with it nobody can,” Wilson said at the time.