God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(9)
Overnight, new prospectors arrived, along with major producers. Within nine months of the Daisy Bradford No. 3 strike, a thousand wells were up and running in the East Texas field, accounting for half the total U.S. demand. Saloons and hotels sprang into existence to accommodate the roughnecks, along with the “man camps” that invariably blossom in the booms. Cities such as Tyler, Kilgore, and Longview suddenly found themselves in a forest of towering derricks, which rose out of backyards and loomed over downtown buildings. In one city block in Kilgore, there were forty-four wells. It was said you could walk from derrick to derrick without touching the ground. Texans pumped so much oil out of the Woodbine that prices fell from $1.10 a barrel to thirteen cents. The governor shut down the wells in an attempt to staunch the decline.
Besieged by lawsuits because of his years of reckless promises, Joiner sold his interest in the lease to H. L. Hunt, who would eventually become the richest man in the world. Dad Joiner died broke in Dallas in 1947.
By the mid-nineties, the oil business in the U.S. was lagging. The industry seemed to be on the verge of peak oil—the moment when at least half of all the recoverable petroleum in the world has been exploited. On the other side of that peak lay an unyielding slope of diminishing returns. The major oil companies began concentrating their exploration efforts outside the U.S., whose reserves were deemed to be more or less used up. The end of the fossil-fuel era was not exactly imminent, but it was no longer unimaginable.
The situation was brutally clear to George Mitchell, one of Texas’s most famous wildcatters. His father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, was a goat-herder from a little village in Greece, who opened up a shoeshine stand in Galveston and changed his name to Mike Mitchell. George worked his way through Texas A&M, studying geology and petroleum engineering, graduating at the top of his class. In 1952, he acted on a tip from a bookie and optioned a plot of land in Wise County, an area in North Texas that was known as the “wildcatter’s graveyard.” He soon had thirteen producing wells, the first of the ten thousand he went on to develop in his career.
In 1954, Mitchell secured a lucrative contract to supply 10 percent of Chicago’s natural-gas needs—up to 200 million cubic feet per day. However, as the years passed, the wells operated by Mitchell Energy & Development were declining. He needed to discover new sources of petroleum, or else.
Mitchell was under the sway of an influential report, published in 1972, by an international team of scientists, led by Dennis L. Meadows at MIT, titled The Limits to Growth. The scientists examined a number of variables—population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources—all of which were increasing exponentially. “Under the assumption of no major change in the present system,” the authors emphatically warned in the section dealing with declining natural resources, “population and industrial growth will certainly stop within the next century, at the latest.” Even under a more optimistic scenario, in which the available natural resources doubled, pollution would overload the capacity of the environment to absorb it, leading to the same dire outcome: “The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” The only way to halt the march to disaster is to achieve what the authors call “equilibrium.” That would mean sacrificing certain liberties, “such as producing unlimited numbers of children or consuming uncontrolled amounts of resources.”
As the father of ten children, Mitchell certainly hadn’t done much to control population, but he was deeply engaged with the concept of responsible growth and environmental welfare. In 1974, he founded a planned community outside Houston, called The Woodlands, designed to be ecologically mindful. (It is now the home to more than 100,000 residents and a number of corporate campuses.) Mitchell began holding conferences there, inspired by the ideas in The Limits to Growth. He and his wife, Cynthia, formed a foundation that is largely dedicated to promoting ideals of sustainability.
In 1980, Mitchell predicted that there were only about thirty-five years of conventional sources of petroleum remaining in the U.S. The obvious alternative was coal, which had dire implications for the environment. Natural gas, on the other hand, was far cleaner, almost an ideal fuel, in Mitchell’s opinion. But was there enough gas remaining to prevent the world from returning to a time when coal-burning fireplaces coated the cities in black ash and smog filled the air with dangerous pollutants?
Mitchell still faced the immediate problem of fulfilling his contract with the city of Chicago. His company’s main assets were the leases that he held on 300,000 acres seventy miles northwest of Dallas, in the region known to oilmen as the Fort Worth Basin. A mile and a half below the surface was a formation called the Barnett Shale. Geologists had speculated that the Barnett, which extends five thousand square miles and spreads through seventeen counties, contained the largest gas reserves of any onshore field in the United States. The problem was that nobody knew how to extract the gas. Porous formations, like the Woodbine sands that Dad Joiner had tapped, allow the flow of liquids and gases, but the Barnett Shale is “tight rock,” meaning that it has very low permeability. In the mid-twentieth century, prospectors attempted to liberate petroleum reserves by pulverizing tight rock. Imaginative techniques—using dynamite, machine guns, bazookas, and napalm—were tried, without success. In 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission, working with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the El Paso Natural Gas Company, exploded a twenty-nine-kiloton nuclear bomb, dubbed Gasbuggy, four thousand feet underground, near Farmington, New Mexico. More than thirty other nuclear explosions followed, in what was called Project Plowshare. Natural gas, it turned out, could be extracted from the atomized rubble, but the gas was radioactive.