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

the state in the late nineteenth century, also in the search for water. When oil was struck it often was more of an annoyance than a cause for celebration. That all changed early in the twentieth century, when a series of remarkable oil discoveries shook the country, including the famed Spindletop gusher in 1901, and a growing need for fuel for automobiles and ships made it a more precious commodity.
    As fields were discovered in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, California, and elsewhere in the United States and around the world, the drilling methods employed were relatively simple—drill bits were sent vertically into the ground aiming for pools, or accumulations, of oil or gas trapped in small spaces in various “reservoir” rock. Poke a hole in and suck it out, just like with a giant straw.
    That kind of drilling—straight down into the ground—sometimes led to gushers, and huge profits, of course. More frequently, this vertical drilling led to “dry holes,” or wells with little or no oil or gas in them, as well as costly losses. Science was used to improve the odds of success, so drilling deep down in the ground in the hopes of hitting pockets of energy wasn’t quite random. But vertical drilling too often was something of a hit-or-miss proposition, with exasperating dry holes regularly resulting.
    “With traditional drilling it’s like a door-to-door salesman, most people say no and then you get a yes once in a while,” explains Jerry Box, who was a Sun Oil exploration executive. “There are emotionally really sharp peaks and really low valleys—the ups are damn exciting, but you have to have an emotional state to deal with it. If you can’t deal with it, you don’t belong.”
    Part of the problem with traditional vertical drilling is that among the numerous sedimentary layers under the ground brimming with oil and gas are those, like shale, that are very long and very narrow. They go on for miles and miles, but their “payzones,” or the section with enough oil or gas to make it worthwhile to drill, are relatively thin. Traditional vertical drilling means penetrating only small parts of these wide horizontal energy deposits.
    To get at other parts of these narrow reservoirs, multiple wells had to be drilled nearby, at additional expense. Even those couldn’t always capture all of the horizontal oil and gas formations. With these wells, it was like playing a game of Battleship and only hitting parts of a huge ship, or missing the ship entirely.
    By the 1970s, producers were realizing that there was less oil and gas to be found in the United States. American oil production peaked in 1970 at 9.6 million barrels a day and began dropping steadily. The challenges put pressure on drilling pros to come up with a better method, one that might reach those long, narrow reservoirs.
    To access more oil and gas, some companies attempted to drill diagonally, by turning a drill bit on an angle of some kind. This kind of “slanted” drilling was a necessity for companies operating from a central platform in offshore waters, though some tried it onshore as well. In 1990, Iraq accused Kuwait of using a type of diagonal drilling to steal its oil, a pretext used by Saddam Hussein to launch a war against Kuwait. Diagonal drilling wasn’t a perfect solution, however, because it didn’t capture enough of those narrow oil and gas slices.
    In 1976, William K. Overby Jr. and Joseph Pasini III, engineers working for a research arm of the Department of Energy, were searching for a method of drilling for methane gas in underground layers of coal. They achieved enough success to patent a method in which they started a drill bit “at a slant rather than directly vertically,” according to the patent application, gradually curving it until it was at “a horizontal position.” (The Department of Energy later provided funding for a number of experimental horizontal gas wells.)
    This method, which came to be called horizontal