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

company. When his friend told him about the new way they were getting oil out of the ground, he immediately became energized.
    “A lightbulb went off in my head,” Bowdon recalls. “I could tell this was going to be disruptive technology, just like the computer.”
    The cat was out of the bag. The warring factions at the company would have to talk to each other about this new way of drilling. Bowdon’s boss, Craig Bourgeois, managed to get approval from Hauptfuhrer and others to expand Sun’s use of horizontal wells to new oil fields, not just the mature ones that had given the company fits. Bourgeois, Bowdon, and the rest of the production crew were full of hope. Even they had no clue how this drilling advance would change the course of history.
    •   •   •
    O nce, it was a fairly simple thing to find petroleum—it was no more difficult than looking down. Far back into antiquity, bitumen, an oily, semisolid ooze, seeped to the surface through cracks and fissures in the earth. Bitumen was used as building mortar and is mentioned in the Bible. It was used to bind the walls of Jericho and bricks used for the Tower of Babel. Bitumen probably helped caulk Noah’s ark and Moses’s basket, according to Daniel Yergin’s
The Prize
. The substance was ubiquitous, the WD-40 of its day.
    Later, petroleum was used in ancient warfare, as noted in Homer’s
Iliad,
and as an all-purpose medical remedy through the Middle Ages, especially in Europe. There, too, seepages were noted, making it relatively easy to gather petroleum. Sometimes peasants dug shafts by hand to obtain crude oil, which was turned into kerosene. A small oil industry developed in Galicia in Eastern Europe, and a pharmacist and plumber from Lvov helped invent a cheap lamp to burn the kerosene. This new kind of illumination caught on in Eastern Europe and spread through the rest of the world, Yergin notes.
    Even during modern times in the United States, it wasn’t very hard to find oil. Locals in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania skimmed oily water off the surface of springs and creeks or wrung out rags and blankets soaked in it. They called it “rock oil,” to distinguish it from vegetable oil and animal fats. The easy-to-find oil was believed to have healing powers, and was used as a cure-all for everything from headaches to deafness. 3
    A group of entrepreneurs in the United States and Canada soon became intrigued by the idea of using this flammable oil to illuminate, as well as to lubricate moving parts in automobiles and ships. They quickly realized that they would need a larger supply of it, and that they’d have to go belowground, rather than just skim the supply that made an appearance close to the surface.
    To find oil, some of these entrepreneurs began adapting drilling methods used for many years to extract salt from areas below the surface. Boring for salt had been developed more than fifteen hundred years earlier in China, where wells went down as deep as three thousand feet. Drilling derricks later were used in Europe and elsewhere, also in search of salt.
    In 1859, Edwin L. Drake drilled a well at a depth of less than seventy feet near natural oil seepages in the tiny town of Titusville, Pennsylvania, becoming the first to drill for oil in the United States. At the time, the drillers described what they were doing as “boring as for salt water,” or just “boring.” They may have used a dull name to describe it, but these early pioneers drilled the world’s first commercial oil wells, though holes of several hundred feet were considered very deep in those early days. 4
    In the North Texas area where George Mitchell and his team later focused, early drilling was aimed at finding water, not oil or natural gas. Texas had few natural lakes and limited water sources, forcing early settlers to drill into the ground to keep burgeoning communities alive. Drilling devices and other innovations, such as rotary drilling, were employed in