The Frackers

"Zuckerman’s fast-paced, densely interesting The Frackers is the first book to tell the stories of the obstinate, ravenous, methodical, sometimes rascally oil executives of the recent boom. By focusing on people instead of trends, it gets to the heart of why the United States is once again the largest supplier of oil and gas in the world."—The New Republic

“Told with care and precision and a deep understanding of finance and corporate politics as well as oil and geology.”— Bryan Burrough, The New York Times

“Fans of the lively, character-driven nonfiction of writers like Kurt Eichenwald and Ben Mezrich should welcome this book with open arms . . . A lively, exciting, and definitely thought-provoking book” —Booklist

“A fascinating study of American entrepreneurial culture and the modern robber barons who succeeded in creating an energy revolution.”—Kirkus

“Lovers of business and capitalism will appreciate The Frackers, … Zuckerman has done valuable and timely reporting on the men and independent companies that created the shale boom.”—Associated Press

 

Auteur

Gregory Zuckerman is a special writer at The Wall Street Journal and author of the New York Times bestseller The Greatest Trade Ever. He is a two-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and a winner of the New York Press Club Journalism Award. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.

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"A lively, exciting, and definitely thought-provoking book.” —Booklist Things looked grim for American energy in 2006, but a handful of wildcatters were determined to tap massive deposits of oil and gas that giants like Exxon and Chevron had ignored. They risked everything on a new process called fracking. Within a few years, they solved America's dependence on imported energy, triggered a global environmental controversy, and made and lost astonishing fortunes. No one understands the frackers—their ambitions, personalities, and foibles—better than Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman. His exclusive access drives this dramatic narrative, which stretches from North Dakota to Texas to Wall Street.

Résumé
“A lively, exciting, and definitely thought-provoking book.” —Booklist

Things looked grim for American energy in 2006, but a handful of wildcatters were determined to tap massive deposits of oil and gas that giants like Exxon and Chevron had ignored. They risked everything on a new process called fracking. Within a few years, they solved America’s dependence on imported energy, triggered a global environmental controversy, and made and lost astonishing fortunes.

No one understands the frackers—their ambitions, personalities, and foibles—better than Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman. His exclusive access drives this dramatic narrative, which stretches from North Dakota to Texas to Wall Street.

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INTRODUCTION William Butler was up nights, full of worry.

The grizzled eighty-three-year-old rancher in South Texas owed millions of dollars to various lenders, had almost nothing in the bank, and feared his two sons wouldn’t be able to manage when he was gone.

Butler had the look of someone just off the set of a John Ford movie. Tall and broad, he tended his cattle in a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and muddy boots. He went by the nickname “Buck,” spent seven days a week working with thousands of cows on his ranch, and in his old age relied on a walking stick made from the manhood of a two-thousand-pound Brahma bull.

Buck Butler was no cinema hero, however. A series of local schemers and connivers had taken advantage of him over the years. Butler compounded his problems by plowing all his free cash into nearby land, usually telling his nervous wife, Vera, about the purchases only after they had been completed.

By 2009, Butler faced growing difficulties with his business and was coping with a nervous system disorder. Vera began taking medication to calm her own nerves.

“When you owe over three million dollars you worry,” she explains.

Less than four years later, on a warm January afternoon in 2013, I bounced around the front seat of Butler’s new Dodge pickup as he told the story of how his difficult days had come to an end and a new life had begun.

Pointing to his rolling acreage like a proud parent, Butler described how one day—just over two years earlier—a representative of Conoco Phillips had come knocking on his office door to ask if the huge oil company could drill on his property. It turned out that a type of rock called shale was buried more than a mile below its surface. The rock was soaked with oil that suddenly had become accessible. Almost overnight, Butler’s land was transformed into some of the most valuable acreage in the world.

Butler parked his truck outside a Mexican restaurant in Nixon, Texas, population twenty-four hundred, and turned to me with piercing blue eyes.

“It’s goddamn unbelievable what’s happened to me in the last two years,” he said, a smile of relief forming on his rugged face. “I have to reach out and pinch myself, it’s too good to be true.”

I was a business reporter from New York on a visit to South Texas in search of a story. My crisp blue Yankees cap seemed to clash with Butler’s scuffed cowboy hat, and his honeyed Texas twang sometimes sounded like an entirely new language. I had spent a career at the Wall Street Journal writing about men and women who traded stocks and bonds, not livestock. Before I began my research, “frack” was the kind of word I’d caution my kids to avoid.

At that moment, though, I was sure my Marlboro Man’s tale, and the stories of others I had heard in places like Williston, North Dakota, New Milford, Pennsylvania, and Lexington, Oklahoma, were among the most compelling a writer could hope to find. Buck Butler and others at the heart of one of the greatest energy revolutions in history had experienced astonishing and unexpected change thanks to American oil and gas discoveries deemed unthinkable just a few years ago. The nation itself had been transformed, as had the world.

The more work I put into the topic, the clearer it became that a burst of drilling in shale and other long-overlooked rock formations had created the biggest phenomenon to hit the business world since the housing and technology booms. In some ways, the impact of the energy bonanza might be more dramatic than the previous expansions, especially if shale drilling catches on around the globe. Surging oil and gas production likely will affect governments, companies, and individuals in remarkable ways for decades to come.

Consider the following:

• As recently as 2006, business and government leaders fretted that America was running out of energy. By 2013, however, the United States was producing seven and a half million barrels of crude oil each day, up from five million in 2005. The country enjoyed its largest production increase in history in 2012 and could pump more than eleven million barrels a day by 2020, its highest figure ever and more than even Saudi Arabia currently produces.
So much oil is flowing that in a few more years, the United States may not need to import any crude, or might only rely on friends such as Canada and Mexico, ending a fifty-year addiction to oil from countries with interests that many years ago diverged from ours. In 2013, Saudi Arabia’s billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal said the kingdom’s oil-dependent economy had become vulnerable to rising U.S. energy production, a shocking tu…