When George Mitchell announced in 1998 that his wells in north Texas were producing gushers of gas, a competitor took it for a practical joke. Seventeen years of trying had finally paid off. The New York Times, in its obituary of Mitchell, noted that The Economist called the $6 million he had put into the project “surely the best development money in the history of gas.”
The record from those who knew the work is more careful than the legend. A Journal of Petroleum Technology history by Dan Steward calls him the “Father of the Shale Gas Revolution” but rejects the older title “Father of Fracturing.” Fracturing, Steward wrote, was proposed in the 1940s and used by thousands of others before Mitchell applied it to a Barnett shale well.
What he actually did
In 1981 Mitchell drilled the discovery well for the Newark East Barnett shale field, the C.W. Slay No. 1. It was meant as a test of other rock. At Mitchell’s insistence the well was deepened, and when the layer below proved tight, he asked for a test of the Barnett above it. The first result was unremarkable. Mitchell began assembling the team he would lead for the next 20 years.
Steward credits Mitchell with building a knowledge base for shale production, with an exploration model that did not need open natural fractures, and with spotting the importance of fracture barriers. Over 17 years, Steward wrote, Mitchell proved the Barnett was a commercial play, then expanded production and bought up more acreage.
The Times described his method this way: drill straight down, turn 90 degrees thousands of feet underground to run horizontally through the shale, then inject a high-pressure mix of water, chemicals and sand to free the trapped gas. It reported that fracking and other unconventional techniques have doubled North American natural gas reserves to three quadrillion cubic feet, ending four decades of decline.
In August 2001 a merger with Devon Energy was announced. The Times put the price of the sale of Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation at $3.5 billion, and noted that it included the results of drilling more than 10,000 wells.
From Galveston to The Woodlands
George Phydias Mitchell was born in Galveston on May 21, 1919. His father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, had tended goats in Greece before reaching Ellis Island in 1901 at the age of 20. A paymaster tired of writing the long name threatened to fire him, and he took the paymaster’s own name, Mike Mitchell.
George’s mother died when he was 13. He finished high school at 16, and because no college would take him that young, he spent another year at a second school brushing up on math. At Texas A&M he sold gold-embossed stationery to pay tuition, finished first in his class in petroleum engineering and captained the tennis team.
Outside the oil patch, Mitchell created The Woodlands in 1974, a 27,000-acre forested development 27 miles north of Houston, backed by a $50 million loan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. More than 100,000 people live there now. With his wife Cynthia he founded a foundation that has given more than $400 million to a range of causes.
Not everyone welcomed what he set loose. Environmentalists and landowners worry that fracking can pollute groundwater, while industry says good engineering practice will curb abuses. Mitchell and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that “we can frack safely if we frack sensibly.” Energy scholar Daniel Yergin said of Mitchell: “It is because of him that we can talk seriously about ‘energy independence.’” Mitchell died in Galveston on July 26, 2013, at 94.
Sources
- George P. Mitchell, a champion of energy industry, dies at 94 (Douglas Martin, The New York Times, reprinted by the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation)
- George P. Mitchell and the Barnett Shale (Dan B. Steward, Journal of Petroleum Technology)
