🌊 Fracking: The Roca Deep Dive

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This week, our swing state road trip took us to Flint, Michigan, a place where we saw and heard things we thought impossible in the United States. While you may be familiar with the Flint water crisis, you may not know that swaths of the city look like an apocalyptic wasteland. Some residents chose to stay; many have no choice. We’ll release our Flint report soon. In the meantime, here’s the Roca deep dive on fracking.

This Thursday night, Kamala Harris declared, “As president I will not ban fracking.”

Five years prior, she said the opposite: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

But what exactly is fracking? Should it be banned? And why did Harris shift her stance?

The story of fracking begins in an impoverished Greek village in 1901, where Savvas Paraskevopoulos had grown tired of herding goats. Seeking more from life, he boarded a ship to New York City, where he arrived at age 20 and took a job working on a railroad. When Paraskevopoulos’s supervisor couldn’t pronounce his name, he gave it up and took a colleague’s – Mike Mitchell – instead. Paraskevopoulos (AKA Mitchell) settled in Galveston, Texas, where he gambled incessantly, opened a shoeshine, and had a son, George.

The younger Mitchell grew up in oil country, which led him to study petroleum engineering and geology at Texas A&M University. It was the Great Depression, and Mitchell sold candy to pay for college. After graduating as valedictorian of his class, Mitchell did what many young Texans did: Looked for oil.

After 12 years, in 1952, he and his brother bought a notoriously bad piece of land – only to make one of the biggest oil finds in history. The resulting profit paved the way for the fracking revolution.

Mitchell’s company acquired land across northern Texas and became a major oil producer. By the 1980s, though, it looked like his prospects were dimming: Mitchell – who was also a conservationist – was influenced by a book called “Limits to Growth,” which predicted dire food and energy shortages.

Mitchell worried that the US would run out of fuel and that oil and coal would destroy the environment.

Sure enough, by the 1990s, Mitchell’s wells were producing less oil and it looked like Texas’ oil boom was behind it. Mitchell wanted to both save his company and bring a cleaner energy source to market. He focused on natural gas, which emits 50-60% less carbon than coal and existed on his company’s land. But the gas was trapped in a rock no one had been able to get it out of.

That rock was shale, which is denser than rocks like limestone or sandstone and therefore harder to get fuel out of. So hard, in fact, that people thought it was impossible.

But Mitchell believed he could do it with a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. First developed in the late 1940s, fracking blasted a highly pressurized combination of sand, gel, and chemicals into the Earth to break open rock formations and release oil and gas, which could then be captured. Fracking had been applied to various kinds of rock, but never one as dense as shale.

Vast tracts of shale sat below the United States and Mitchell fanatically sought to break it open. He drilled well after well for 15 years, during which costs mounted and Mitchell was forced to sell off his passion project – the Woodlands, an environmentally focused custom-built city outside Houston – and shelve others. Mitchell was widely believed to be wasting billions of dollars.

Would it pay off?

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