The New Map

Daniel Yergin is "America's most influential energy pundit" (New York Times) and "one of the planet's foremost thinkers about energy and its implications" (Fortune). Dr. Yergin is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, and Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War, and coauthor of Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. He is vice chairman of IHS Markit, one of the world's leading information and research firms.

Chapter 1

The Gas Man

If you want to get to the beginning of the shale revolution, pick up Interstate 35E out of Dallas and head north forty miles and then take the turnoff for the tiny town of Pender. Pass the feed store, the white water tower, the sign for the Cowboy Church, and the donut store that's closed down. Another four miles and you're in Dish, Texas, population 407. You end up at a wire mesh fence around a small tangle of pipes with a built-in stepladder. You're there-the SH Griffin #4 natural gas well. The sign on the fence tells the date-drilled in 1998.

That was not exactly a great time to be drilling a well. Oil and gas prices had cratered with the Asian financial crisis and the ensuing global economic panic. But SH Griffin #4 would change things more than anyone could have imagined at the time.

The well was drilled mainly with standard technology, but also with experimentation and ingenuity, despite considerable skepticism. The small band of believers working on the well were convinced that somehow you could extract natural gas from dense shale rock in a way that was commercially viable-something that the petroleum engineering textbooks said was impossible. More than anyone else, the unshakable conviction belonged to one man, their boss-George P. Mitchell. He had been a true believer for a long time.

To grasp the intensity of that conviction, you have to understand that the road to SH Griffin #4 really begins much longer ago, in a tiny village in Greece's Peloponnesian peninsula.

In 1901, an illiterate twenty-year-old shepherd named Savvas Paraskevopoulos decided that his only ticket out of a life of poverty was to emigrate to the United States. By the time he ended up in Galveston, Texas, he had been rechristened Mike Mitchell. He eventually opened a laundry and shoeshine shop that just barely supported his family. His son George enrolled at Texas A&M University, where he studied geology and the relatively new discipline of petroleum engineering. George was poor, and this was the time of the Great Depression. To pay his way through school, he sold candy and embossed stationery to the other students, waited on their tables, and did tailoring on their clothes. He also captained the tennis team and came top in his class.

After World War II, Mitchell did not want to work for anyone else. With a couple of partners, he opened an office as a consulting geologist atop a Houston drugstore. By the 1970s, he had built a sizable oil and gas company, though with ups and downs along the way. But he had an unusual proclivity. He favored natural gas over oil.

Around 1972, he came across The Limits to Growth, a book by an environmental group, the Club of Rome, It predicted that a soon-to-be overpopulated world would run out of natural resources. Intrigued, he became increasingly interested in environmental issues. Natural gas became for him not only a business but also a cause, for it was cleaner than burning coal. Sometimes he would call up people and berate them if he thought that they had said something nice about coal.

Fueled by his new environmental ethos, he launched a totally different business-creating a wooded, landscaped, forty-four-square-mile master-planned community north of Houston called The Woodlands. Its slogan was "the livable forest." (Today it has a population over one hundred thousand.) Mitchell involved himself in the decision making down to the details of the flower beds and trees and populating it with wild turkeys (until one got shot).

Yet he could hardly ignore his energy business. He had a big problem. Mitchell Energy was contracted to provide 10 percent of Chicago's natural gas. But the reserves of gas in the ground to support that contract were running down. Mitchell Energy needed to do something. That is when Mitchell stumbled across a possible solution.