Free The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

evening of mai tai toasts with his hosts, who were selling oil drilling concessions for the first time, Hauptfuhrer felt sudden chest pain and was rushed to a pitch-dark local hospital in the middle of the night. There, he watched workers search to find the lights and struggle to properly place electrodes from an electrocardiogram on his chest.
    “If I didn’t have anxiety before, I had it then,” Hauptfuhrer recalled.
    He returned to the United States and suffered a heart attack at a Philadelphia hospital, resulting in quadruple-bypass open-heart surgery. It took months for him to recover.
    Even as Hauptfuhrer struggled to run the division, something amazing was happening in the oil fields of Texas. One day in 1984, an oil field contractor brought an idea to Sun’s production pros. Technology had advanced to the point where some drilling could be done in a sideways fashion, he said, rather than vertically, the traditional way wells had always been tapped. After years of experimentation, many of the kinks had been worked out and horizontal drilling now could be done in a more cost-efficient way, the contractor said.
    He called this kind of drilling a “short-radius lateral.” It was just a technical term that meant a drill bit now could bore horizontally over short distances. It had nothing to do with the hydraulic fracturing of compressed rock that George Mitchell’s crew was focused on. Horizontal drilling was just an improved way to target oil and gas reservoirs below the surface.
    Some horizontal drilling already was being done by a pioneering company called Union Pacific Resources, though the company could only drill about 150 feet at the time. The consultant advised Sun to give it a shot, too, adding that advances in computer imaging and improvements in seismic analysis of underground reservoirs made it a perfect time to try this horizontal approach.
    For years, geologists had daydreamed of drilling long, narrow slices of rock below the surface that were thick with oil and gas, much as astronauts long to visit out-of-reach planets. The Sun production team instantly realized that horizontal drilling held the possibility of finally reaching this tantalizing rock.
    They agreed to test horizontal drilling on one old, tired well in the Austin Chalk area. Almost immediately, the loser well turned into a huge winner, as production soared.
    It seemed great news, at least for the first day or so. But the glee of the crew quickly turned to panic—they realized that if Sun’s rivals found out how much oil they were producing and how easily it was coming up, these competitors would do their own sideways drilling and Sun wouldn’t be able to buy nearby wells from rivals at reasonable prices. They had to do something to mask their success or they’d be known for blowing a major opportunity.
    “Shut it down!” a production executive screamed to several well hands.
    When the company reported its production to the state at the end of the month, the results of the well didn’t look out of the ordinary. The well produced with horizontal drilling had given up the same amount of oil that nine of Sun’s old, tired vertical wells had produced. The big difference was that the horizontal well had produced all that oil in just two days! Hardly anyone knew about their breakthrough, though, because they had shut down the well so rapidly.
    There was another, more devious reason for the secrecy of the Sun gang. Sun was such a fractious place that the production crew was determined to keep their colleagues in the exploration department in the dark about this newfangled drilling, lest they emerge as the company’s new heroes.
    But Bowdon, a junior geologist in Sun’s exploration group, got a tip from a friend in the production group that something big was happening. Bowdon’s job was to do the geoscience and recommend drilling locations, and he had been itching for a chance to pursue some huge wells, to make his own mark on the