When E. Roberts founds his company in , his many patents give him a monopoly on torpedoes needed by the oil industry. Despite heroic actions during the battle, he was cashiered from Union Army in Many more of the technology patents would follow. The Roberts torpedo system would eclipsed earlier methods, including black powder or dropping sticks of dynamite down a well, which often collapsed boreholes and ruined oil production. Sadly, the same month Roberts was awarded his first exploding torpedo patent, a failed seeker of oil riches assassinated President Lincoln.
Roberts received another U. Patent No. The Titusville Morning Herald newspaper reported: Our attention has been called to a series of experiments that have been made in the wells of various localities by Col.
Roberts, with his newly patented torpedo. The results have in many cases been astonishing. The torpedo, which is an iron case, containing an amount of powder varying from fifteen to twenty pounds, is lowered into the well, down to the spot, as near as can be ascertained, where it is necessary to explode it.
It is then exploded by means of a cap on the torpedo, connected with the top of the shell by a wire. The technique had an immediate impact — production from some wells increased 1, percent within a week of being shot — and the Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company flourished. The inventor was outraged.
Roberts hired Pinkerton detectives and lawyers to protect his patent — and is said to have been responsible for more civil litigation in defense of a patent than anyone in U. Applied legally or illegally, by nitroglycerin was preferred to black powder, despite its frequently fatal tendency to detonate accidentally. Pouring nitroglycerin was risky enough in late 19th century oilfields.
Roberts died a wealthy man on March 25, , in Titusville. The explosion caused the Nellie Johnstone No. A century earlier, farther east of the oilfields at Oil City and Titusville and the notorious boom town of Pithole , the giant Bradford oilfield had its own well fracturing service companies.
A notable one was Mrs. His company would continue shooting wells, but with safer, modern explosives and procedures. Related to petroleum formation fracturing, development of well perforation was another important downhole technology.
Learn more in Downhole Bazooka. On March 17, , a team of petroleum production experts converges on an oil well about 12 miles east of Duncan, Oklahoma — to perform the first commercial application of hydraulic fracturing. Later that day, Halliburton and Stanolind company personnel successfully fractured another oil well near Holliday, Texas.
The first commercial hydraulic fracturing of an oil well took place in about 12 miles east of Duncan, Oklahoma. An experimental well fractured two years earlier in Hugoton, Kansas — home of a massive natural gas field — had proven the possibility of hydraulic fracturing for increased gas well productivity. That distinction, most people agree, goes to a man named George Mitchell, who drew on research done by the government to experiment on the Barnett Shale, an area of tight rock in the Fort Worth basin of North Texas.
On 12 February — a day McClendon would later describe as the best of his career — he and Ward took Chesapeake public. So McClendon and Ward simply switched accounting firms. They got in some good places because they shut everyone else out.
That made some people millionaires, but it wreaked havoc on others. Nor was he frugal when it came to his personal life. He had one of the best wine collections in the world. To Wall Street investors, McClendon was delivering on what they wanted most: consistency and growth. His pitch was that fracking had transformed the production of gas from a hit-or-miss proposition to one that operated with an on and off switch.
It was manufacturing, not wildcatting. B ack in , when McClendon was just getting started, the consensus view had been that the US was running out of natural gas. It became a fixation for Alan Greenspan, the once-revered chair of the Federal Reserve, who warned Congress during a rare appearance that the shortage and rising cost of gas could hurt the American economy.
Greenspan recommended that the US build terminals to accept deliveries of liquefied natural gas from other countries. Such fears eventually helped push through the Energy Policy Act of , which exempted natural gas drillers from having to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, thus averting costly regulatory oversight. As fracking took off, McClendon began telling anyone who would listen that the US had enough natural gas to last more than years. He was adamant that employees should drive cars fuelled by compressed natural gas.
At the same time, Vladimir Putin was making similar bets. In an attempt to set up a cartel for gas, the Russian premier hosted a group of gas-producing countries, including Algeria, Iran, and Venezuela, in Moscow. The US was not among them.
The time of cheap energy resources, cheap gas, is surely coming to an end. When the going got rough, McClendon had always survived by borrowing yet more money to acquire more properties. But he had forgotten the flipside of that industry truism. Time and again, in commodity markets, high prices encourage more producers to produce, creating a surplus, that then crushes prices — and producers.
T he price of natural gas began to plunge in , and in , the price of oil followed suit. The United States was running on empty, just like Mitchell Energy. A growing dependence on foreign energy pressured the country into costly foreign entanglements, such as the invasion of Iraq seven years earlier. Mitchell had begun to cede control of his company, handing the job of president to a former Exxon veteran, Bill Steven, who was no fan of shale drilling.
Stevens grew visibly frustrated when George Mitchell discussed plans to expand shale drilling. When he saw Stevens, Bowker got excited and began speaking about their plans to drill in shale. You better find some other area to spend time on, Stevens told him. Pressure shifted to a soft-spoken engineer named Nicholas Steinsberger, who looked younger than his thirty-one years. Steinsberger, who ran the fracking effort in the Barnett, worked with his colleagues to blast the Texas rock with different liquids and gels, hoping to create pathways for trapped gas to escape.
Nothing worked, though. Once upbeat and optimistic, Mitchell turned frustrated with his team. After another failed well, he cursed and ranted. A contractor was pumping a substance that was more of a liquid than the thicker, Jell-O-like substance normally used to fracture the rock and open its pores so gas could flow. Steinsberger began to wonder if a watery mix might be able to fracture this tough, compressed rock.
A few weeks later, Steinsberger went to an industry outing at a Texas Rangers baseball game. Over barbecue and beer, he chatted with Mike Mayerhofer, a friend who worked for a rival called Union Pacific Resources. It's Not Going to Work. Most everyone thought Steinsberger was out of his mind. Shale has clay in it. Adding more water would create an awful mess. Steinsberger and his crew experimented with their new liquid, trying to ignore the critics.
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