The wild tale of America’s energy revolution, and the cowboy who made and lost billions on shale. By Bethany McLean
Between 2006 and 2015, the energy world was turned upside-down by an epic development in the oil industry few had foreseen. From the low point, in 2006, when it imported 60% of its oil, the US became an oil powerhouse – eclipsing both Saudi Arabia and Russia – and by the end of 2015, was the world’s largest producer of natural gas.
This remarkable transformation was brought about by American entrepreneurs who figured out how to literally force open rocks often more than a mile below the surface of the earth, to produce gas, and then oil. Those rocks – called shale, source rock or tight rock, and once thought to be impermeable – were opened by combining two technologies: horizontal drilling, in which the drill bit can travel more than two miles horizontally, and hydraulic fracturing, in which fluid is pumped into the earth at a high enough pressure to crack open hydrocarbon-bearing rocks, while a so-called proppant, usually sand, holds the rocks open a sliver of an inch so the hydrocarbons can flow. A fracking entrepreneur likens the process to creating hallways in an office building that has none – and then calling a fire drill.
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