Frack the Model
Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true.
Throughout my teens and twenties, I heard a refrain repeated so often that I just accepted it as a fact:
“The United States will never reduce its dependency on foreign oil.”
The majority of our energy systems are powered by petroleum-based fossil fuels, and throughout the 20th and early 21st century, we couldn’t produce enough ourselves, so we sourced a large amount from the Middle East and Russia.
The Gulf Coast petro-states are violent, tyrannical, and have a nasty tendency of getting the US caught up in wars overseas.
If Americans were oil addicts, the gulf were our drug dealers, and that meant that they exerted a lot of power over us. This addiction was also profoundly destructive to the environment and the climate.
And Russia…is Russia. More on that later.
Environmentalists and foreign policy doves saw no end to this dirty arrangement. They argued for the rapid adoption of clean fuels, but they were cynical about anything ever changing.
Except they were wrong. Their models were completely…fracked.
In 2010, American oil and natural gas drillers started experimenting with new techniques that led to startling results.
George Mitchell was a geologist and Texas oil man who ran a company called Mitchell energy. He experimented for years in the 1980’s and 90’s by injecting chemicals into the earth to crack rock formations in order to unlock fuel reserves in the earth.
This was called fracking. Fracking was not a new technique - it had been around since the 1940’s. But nobody had succeeded in using it to release natural gas from shale beds.
It was dismissed as a lost cause. Mitchell fracked and fracked for fifteen, with few results to show. People called him crazy.
But in the late 1990s, fracking started to get results. New strategies and technologies, including new chemical mixtures, created a path to extraction and profitability.
By 2010, fracking was exploding, and its gas made up 35% of the United States’ natural gas production. It grew and grew until it led the United States to become the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world - and a net exporter.
The ramifications were far reaching. American oil dependency on the Middle East was over, and the geopolitical landscape completely transformed. Predictions around peak oil were thrown away. And yes, the environmental consequences of fracking, including poisoning local drinking water and small earthquakes, were devastating.
George Mitchell passed away in 2013 after pioneering the single biggest energy innovation of the 21st century. The New York Times wrote in his obituary:
“Is the measure of an innovator marked by surpassing technological ingenuity, or by unswerving determination? Surely Mitchell had some of the former, but more of the latter. Through 15 years of failure, he ignored the supposed wisdom of the crowd. “In science, you have to be very aware of consensus,” says Dan Steward, the former Mitchell Energy manager. “It’s based on people’s theories and models at the time. And sometimes it’s damn wrong. And in this case it was damn wrong.” In the end, Mitchell proved that there is no innovative force quite so powerful as the problem-solver able to balance the world’s disbelief with a resolute belief in himself.”
In other words, the models were completely….fracked.
There is no doubt about it - fracking is controversial. Environmentalists argue that it has prolonged our dependency on fossil fuels and devastated the local environment. On the other hand, it has reaped enormous economic benefits and reduced home heating costs for millions of Americans.
Whether you support or oppose it, the deeper lesson of fracking is one for everyone. We should not be so confident that we know what is going to happen in the future. Experts are often wrong, and in this case, they were really wrong. Things can radically change in a matter of years and disrupt the economic and geopolitical landscape.
Next week, I’ll discuss how fracking affects the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller
PSA: I wrote a book called Break The Model, which goes deeper into the topic of models falling apart and becoming obsolete.