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Your nearest shell station is closer than you think. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. Often the biggest breakthroughs start with problems nearly everyone else has given up on solving. In the 1980s, affordable and plentiful energy and fuel across America Was that problem? Nearly every expert saw no immediate solution.
One man disagreed. Up next, the story of George Mitchell, the Shell Revolution, and the gamble that reshaped America's energy landscape. Here to start us off is Dan B. Stewart, the former vice president of. Mitchell Energy.
Take it away, Dan. most people when they think about sustainability they think about populations they think about food and water. atmospheric air conditions George was thinking about, look, if I don't have energy, I can have all the food and water in the world. If I can't get it from point A to point B, all the people at point B are going to starve to death. The principle of the household fuse or circuit breaker, keeping supply and demand in near balance, can be extended to all forms of energy.
All in effect have circuit breakers. And when the demand grows greater than the immediate supply, the circuits break. An energy crisis. He understood that like no other person did. Here's author and economic historian Daniel Jurgen.
with more. George Mitchell was a Texas entrepreneur, the son of an immigrant. He worked his way through school. He never wanted to work for anybody else. He started his own company, but he wasn't an oil man.
He was a gas man. He believed in natural gas, and that was almost his vocation. He built up a substantial company. George recognized that gas. was gonna be a few of the few c They thought it was environmentally preferable, much cleaner fuel than coal.
We can create all the electricity we need with gas to run electric vehicles, and the amount of carbon put out by gas is relatively insignificant compared to coal. I remember once. Just out of the blue, when I was just kind of starting out in my career, he thought I'd said something nice about coal. I just pointed out that in the 80s, the U.S. government was really promoting coal as a domestic energy source.
And he called me and just, you know, denounced coal. One time I went to the president and I told him that We wanted to look for oil in this one area. And he said, Dan, what about us being a gas company? Don't you understand? And I apologize and I said, I'm sorry, I understand now.
And I went back to my office. And in fact, He actually created outside Houston a community called Woodlands, which by its name was with trees and a planned community that was meant to be very environmentally dedicated. you know, a great place to live, a great place to work. And so he was a strong environmentalist and was building this community at the same time he was building the gas business. But he had a problem.
We're in an energy crisis now and will be for some time to come. We have at present an absolute shortage of natural gas. We cannot produce as much as we can use, as we are equipped to use in our homes and our factories. This situation is destined to continue indefinitely. And by indefinitely, I mean not only just the next few years, but as far ahead as we can see.
We were about to run out of Cheap energy, except for coal, which was very pollutant. People didn't understand, didn't know. that we were approaching a very bad situation. where we were going to have to import gas. from anybody who would sell it to us.
at about any price. Uh get a contract to supply gas to Chicago, 10% of Chicago's gas, and he was running out of reserves. And he said, buying. He read an article about the ability to get natural gas out of this very dense rock called shale. And he told us: We've got all this acreage in the Wise County area.
We've got all these people up here working. We have all this infrastructure with. Compressors and looped lines.
So George said, We've got all this stuff here.
So I want you to find a replacement. Right here, we've got 10 years and he says, if y'all don't think you can do it, tell me. I'll find people who can. To wind things back a little, George wasn't asking his team to discover some brand new gas field. They already knew the gas was there.
And fracking also wasn't an extraordinary revolutionary technology at the time. It had been around for a while. The problem was that it was trapped inside those aforementioned dense layers of shell rock. drill a normal well, and almost nothing would come out. Oil companies had tried for years to make Shell pay.
They all failed. The industry had come to a simple conclusion. The gas wasn't impossible to reach. It was impossible to produce a profit from it. Everybody scoffed.
They said the textbook said it was impossible. You could never do it commercially. I was not too old at the time. I think I was about. 33, 34 and I had a wife and four kids and it was to my benefit to try and keep that job.
because, you know, jobs were starting to get hard to find and I told him, my boss told him, oh we can, we'll do that, we'll find something. It was going to be incredibly complicated. Maybe just explain, when you're doing a shale well, What you're doing is you're drilling maybe 10,000 feet down into the earth, well below the water table, and then you're going to go two miles, drill parallel to in a horizontal fashion, if you can visualize that. And the kind of precision and computer capabilities you need are very extensive to do that. Like sticking a straw into concrete.
That's how people felt about it. The work required wasn't just extensive, it was expensive. And many in George's company had simply had enough. George Mitchell owned greater than 50% share. of the stock of mutual energy.
and when everybody on his board wanted to sell North Texas George told em, look, Y'all take a vote. As I understand it, The entire board, including his sons. one to sale before we had Barnett. proven from an industry standpoint. And George said no.
He kept at it for 18 years. But one of the things that People in science and engineering and medicine, I think, understand is that. There is. There is no settling of a science issue. I don't care if there's consensus.
We find that with time, science changes, and it helped us to understand what we're looking at better. And that's what happened with the Barnett Shell.
Well, my wife just reminded me that before I met her, I was nothing, and since I met her, I did pretty well, so I want to give her thanks. But he mentioned that some back the history about my Greek parents and Really, they were great people because they came to this country right after the turn of the century. Neither of them could read or write. English of course, but they couldn't even read or write Greek. But they did have the interest to really try to be sure that their children had an education, and for that I'd be forever grateful.
It's easy to say how you may have a chance to get started. And I went to NM University, I had the opportunity of a great institution. I was able to get through school in engineering and geology and start out as a consulting geologist engineer with a brother of mine. But how these things happen sometimes, that I do the geology and engineering at night, working late hours. And then he'd get the deal, and I'd get the deal geology ready for him.
He'd go down to the Esperson drugstore and sell it to about 30 people around the stools there. That's how you get started in some of these things and One day, one of the biggest fields that we found, the lead came to us through a Chicago bookie. Lo and behold, that field now has 2,000 wells. and it's furnishing about 150 million feet of gas today to the Chicago market. That's the type of things that happen, although in the meantime we've discovered some 200 or 300, 250 oil and gas fields, and of course we've done a lot of real estate development around the Houston area.
But these are the things of hard work. and some luck to make these things possible. When we come back, more of the story of George Mitchell. and the American Shale Revolution. Here.
on our American stories. Hi, I'm Steph, and I work at United Healthcare. When I think about United Healthcare's members, I think of my own family. My niece was diagnosed with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. I know how hard it is for families.
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Klarna balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of George P. Mitchell. and the Shell Revolution.
When we last left off, Dan Stewart and Daniel Juergen were telling us about George's problem. supplying natural gas to Chicago with his dwindling reserves. and his unorthodox solution, fracking the dense shale rock to get the gas out by force. It was a massive gamble. His company viewed it as a science experiment gone wrong.
and was ready to give up on it. but a tragedy would force George's hand. Let's get back to the story here again is Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Daniel Jurgan. He kept at it for 18 years and is just about to throw in the towel.
Wh we got hit with a lawsuit about water contamination. There were people that were trying to imply that we were responsible for. Methane gas in The shallow waters. And we weren't. The fact of the matter is that when you have a world-class source rock like the Barnett.
close to the surface. the gas starts migrating out.
Well, we didn't do any testing. to have a pre-barnette Analysis.
So we got sued. and they didn't take it as serious as they should have. And we lost. And um There were several things that came out that The judge on that was overseeing the suit was a partner in one of the law firms that was involved in the suit. And there were several other things.
So we had another suit. They brought in the big guns on that one. and we were able to prove that the methane in the shallow water was natural migration. Because of that lawsuit, even though Mitchell beat it. That basically was kind of hair on the oil and gas side.
In other words, people looking at us would say, Man, they got sued on that. What if somebody come back and tries to sue again?
So George, I actually, I think. I had originally thought he would Maybe sell the oil and gas side and keep the real estate, but because of that, he couldn't. And so I've told people it was a Godsend. It kept us from selling it. It kept us going after things and looking for the answers.
If he had sold the oil and gas side right then, he would have got pennies on the dollar. The company that would have bought it would have been interested in everything else. and probably plugged out the barnett saying we don't know why they did that. In hindsight, although the decision would prove to be beneficial for American energy independence, For George Mitchell, it was tragic. Thwoodland's real estate development was his personal baby and what he cared the most about.
when the draft press release for the sale of the Woodlands was sent to him for approval. He'd simply write on it.
Okay. but sad.
However, despite all this tragedy, George Mitchell's team was about to make a breakthrough. One of his guys, and this is the accidents of history, went to a baseball game in Dallas, sat next to somebody else who said there's this other technique called. Slick water fracking, as they called it. They started fracking without using any gels. And with using essentially no sand.
Our concern was that. Fracking a shale with a freshwater system was considered a no-no within the oil field. What happens is with a lot of engineers and geologists, because they were told don't frack shales with fresh water. They didn't stop and think. That's not all shales, okay?
The barnette consisted of a shell of that fresh water wouldn't hurt. And I proved that to my boss because we had taken a piece of the core and put it in a bucket of fresh water and let it sit there for a year. It had absolutely no effects on that shell. They said we're risking running Three good wills. That's the way they saw it.
We can afford to do that if it's going to save us millions and millions of dollars. And none of the three were what he considered to be. mechanical successes. In other words, he did not get the entire frack away. And this was going to be the last well.
They were going to close it down after 18 years. And he tried it. And the well came on at 2 million cubic feet of gas a day. and it stayed at that rate for about Somewhere in the neighborhood of six miles or longer. And so he considered that to be the first commercial success.
It succeeded. And that was the beginning in 1998 of what became the shale revolution. It isn't just called the Shell Revolution because George Mitchell finally figured it out. It's called the Shale Revolution because of how much natural gas was in the region. George had unlocked something that would fundamentally transform the American energy industry, no, the world's energy industry, forever.
Here's Kent Balcour with more. This process takes days to measure how much gas comes off. You actually drill the rock. And you core it, which is like taking a core out of an apple. And we measure how much gas comes off.
Now, we need to transport that to the laboratory. How do we transport it? We put it inside these aluminum cylinders that are about three feet long. and then we put rubber caps. over the ends.
And we get hose clamps, like radiator hose clamps, so that those pieces of rock are secure in these aluminum cylinders.
So we were doing this, and I'm helping the crew, the laboratory guys, they're measuring how much gas is coming off. We're stacking them up, and I look over at the stack. And these rubber end caps are starting to expand. and are starting to get to the size of volleyballs. and are starting to expand to get in the size of Basketballs.
And I'm like Holy. Moly.
Well, I didn't say holy moly, but you can imagine what I said. And I like all of a sudden, these pieces of rock in these aluminum tubes. have turned into pipe bobs. Because of all the methane and gas that are coming out of this rock, this rock contains so much gas that it's expand and it's under so much pressure That is expanding. this thick rubber end caps.
You know, I'm like. Wow, that's a lot of gas In fact, that's more gas than I've ever seen in my life. That's what told me this rock has more gas in it, than anyone can imagine. And I was the only guy that knew it. Anybody that discovers something new, you're the only one that knows it.
you know how am i going to explain what i'm seeing here completely opposite of what I've been taught my entire life as a petroleum geologist. But This should be happening. And then we finally got the data back. The results were incredible. Four times as much gas as anyone had actually thought there would be.
So, voila, you know. We had almost four times more gas in place. And we had a technique that cost half as much that could get more gas out. all of a sudden a play that was marginal turns into a money printing machine. You know, Mitchell turned out to be a prophet and an individual who really has changed the course of history by his stubbornness.
If George Mitchell hadn't have done what he did, By 2003, natural gas prices going to homes and businesses. probably would have been in excess of $12 an MCF. Right now, it's about, I think, three dollars an MCF, and it fluctuates between. two and a quarter and 350 right now.
Okay, can you imagine what twelve dollars an MCF would have done? to our ability to manufacture in this country. If you look, if you look before Mitchell, Our home energy prices were going up. That was bad. But our ability to produce goods was being moved out of the country.
It was being moved to countries that had real cheap labor. and had somewhat cheaper energy at the time. Mexico had cheaper energy. Yeah, it's been transformative. And it used to be such a big issue that we were dependent upon imports and being dependent on imports meant that our economy was vulnerable politically and it was vulnerable economically to shocks of one kind or another.
What's now been transformed is The United States actually has a kind of flexibility and freedom in foreign affairs that it just didn't have before. And our economy is much safer. And we have what's called energy security, which we really didn't have for decades going back. to um to the nineteen seventies, I think it's roughly eight presidents who kept calling for energy independence and we couldn't get there.
Now we got there. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to Dan B. Stewart, former VP of Mitchell Energy. and Daniel Juergen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize in his latest great book, The New Map.
And my goodness, as Jürgen had pointed out, after 18 years, Mitchell was ready to throw in the towel, and these lawsuits came at him, too. But not soon after the discovery. And in 1998, well that shell revolution, well it exploded. He was the profit in the end of this industry, made us a safer country, made energy prices cheaper for all of us, and of course, better for all of our planet. The story of George Mitchell.
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