Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation Blog http://georgepmitchell.com Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation Blog en-us http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/73/The-latest-villain-of-the-cult-of-catastrophe.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/73/The-latest-villain-of-the-cult-of-catastrophe.html <![CDATA[The latest villain of the cult of catastrophe]]> TORONTO - At the age of 94, George P. Mitchell died last month. Who's that you say? Not to worry, I didn't know who he was either. Quoting energy guru Daniel Yergin, the Wall Street Journal's obituary describes him as the man who "more than anyone else, is responsible for the most important energy innovation of the 21st century." In popular legend, Mitchell was "the father of fracking."

Technically, the proper term for fracking is hydraulic fracturing, a process that involves using high-pressure blasts of water and sand - plus a smattering of chemicals - to extract hitherto inaccessible oil and natural gas from shale rock thousands of feet below the earth's surface. To borrow a phrase from National Review's Kevin Williamson, it offers the prospect of "cheap, relatively clean, ayatollah-free energy," not to mention "thousands of new jobs for blue-collar workers and Ph.D.s alike."

And brown jobs - meaning jobs in the oil and gas industry - are where the action is. Since 2007, the American oil and gas industry has experienced 40 per cent employment growth. Indeed, it's now considered feasible that the U.S. is on course to become a net energy exporter again.

As the Journal tells it, Mitchell was a petroleum engineering graduate who'd been in the energy exploration business since returning from military service after the Second World War. And as early as the 1970s, he became dedicated to the idea of getting gas out of rock. What's more, he was willing to spend bags of his own money to make it work.

Of course, not everyone is enthused about the fracking boom. New things make people uncomfortable, and there's an understandable concern about anything that could contaminate aquifers and thus water supplies. To that end, documentary film-maker Josh Fox created a stir with his depiction of tap water on fire in Colorado.

But when it comes to Fox and his movie, Williamson doesn't mince words - the term he uses is "fraudulent." Noting that the particular "Colorado community made famous by the film has had water catching on fire since at least the 1930s," he makes the point that natural geological processes mean that places with a lot of gas in the ground will sometimes have gas in the water.

The science journalist Matt Ridley is similarly critical of Fox. And he goes further. Writing about American aquifers in the Times, he puts it this way: "The total number that has been found to be polluted by either fracking fluid or methane gas as a result of fracking in the United States is zero."

It's also hard to escape the sense that some of the opposition to fracking is ideological. This isn't how things were supposed to unfold. The era of cheap fossil fuels was supposed to be running out, leading to a new energy paradigm that emphasised wind turbines, solar panels and conservation.

Then there's the catastrophe scenarios. Over the last several decades, we've had the Club of Rome's limits to growth, the population bomb and related global famine, the energy crisis and peak oil, and so forth.

They've all had two things in common. One is that legions of educated and intelligent people signed-up for the programme and duly wagged a reproaching finger at their less aware brethren. The other is that the foretold catastrophes didn't arrive.

The late economist Julian Simon was an early contrarian on this subject. In 1981's The Ultimate Resource, he explicitly took issue with the view that the future would be defined by resource scarcity and hardship. In fact, he argued that natural resources weren't finite in any meaningful way, and that what mattered was human creativity in unlocking them. Although he made no mention of fracking, it was surely the kind of innovation he had in mind.

And like George P. Mitchell, Simon was prepared to put his money on the line. In a public bet with celebrated doomster Paul Ehrlich, he wagered that a basket of five key metals would decline in price between 1980 and 1990, thus debunking the alarms about impending scarcity and depletion. Ehrlich even got to pick the contents of the basket, but Simon won the bet.

Still, catastrophism never seems to lose its allure. A cynic would be tempted to suggest that it's the modern educated person's substitute for religion.

 

Columnist Pat Murphy worked in the Canadian financial services industry for over 30 years. Originally from Ireland, he has a degree in history and economics.

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Wed, 21 Aug 2013 14:23:51 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/72/Stephen-Hawking-Eulogizes-George-P.-Mitchell.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/72/Stephen-Hawking-Eulogizes-George-P.-Mitchell.html <![CDATA[Stephen Hawking Eulogizes George P. Mitchell]]> Two weeks ago, Galveston born and raised George P. Mitchell passed away at age 94. He was well-known as a Texas oil billionaire but less well-known as a keen advocate of science.

He not only funded basic research, he was a driving force in getting President Ronald Reagan to support the Superconducting Super Collider, a futuristic high-energy machine killed off by Congress and President Clinton in 1993, and he donated the land for Texas A  &  M University at Galveston. 1,200 people showed up yesterday to celebrate his life.

His interest in basic research, including advocacy for the SSC and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, was little known outside Texas, he was better known nationally as a former oil wildcatter who pursued fracking when peers in industry and scientists in government said it would never be viable. And so he did what large companies had been trying to do since the 1940s - extract natural gas from shale rock formations safely and economically. Using 3-D seismic data, his team came up with a mixture of sand and water that safely released gas from the shale, something government scientists in the U.S. Department of Energy were unable to do. 

Even the Board of Directors at his company had kept telling him not to pursue it. But it was his for-profit company and so he did pursue it - the sunk costs of research were so high they didn't even break even until after the 36th natural gas site was developed. So much for the notion that greedy Big Oil only cares about short-term profits.

“The science wasn’t there to assist them,” Dan Steward, who led teams at Mitchell Energy  &  Development, told The Energy Fix, but Mitchell believed it was the future. Its success made him a billionaire but Mitchell took credit for none of it beyond being a believer - he instead deferred to geologists, chemists and engineers for making hydraulic fracturing work. And he then paid science back in many ways. 

Texas A& M University physicist Peter McIntyre tells of how Mitchell quietly saved the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Mitchell also bankrolled development of technology for high energy accelerators and was responsible for using that same technology to make a more powerful magnet for magnetic resonance spectroscopy in biomedicine, a key tool in deciphering the structure of proteins for cancer research.

He created the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A  &  M, which is why Professor Stephen Hawking euologized him:

"George P Mitchell was a remarkable individual who combined vision with wisdom and persistence. Through sheer hard work and dedication, he leaves behind an extraordinary legacy. It can be said of very few people that they changed the world—but George Mitchell is among those few.

"I first met George in 2002 when Chris Pope flew him to see me in Pasadena to persuade him to support physics at Texas A&M University, not that he needed much persuading.

"George had been a strong backer of the superconducting super+collider, which would have been more powerful and earlier than the LHC but was cancelled half-built 

"After our meeting, George got things moving and when I visited Texas A&M the following year, there was already the George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Fundamental Physics which has since moved to splendid new premises. Through George's support, Texas A&M has become a leading university for research into physics and cosmology.

"I am proud to remember him as a friend. I had several happy visits to his beautiful nature reserve in Texas where George did me and my colleagues the honor of allowing us to hold a physics conference. While none of us can match George's ingenuity in geophysical discovery, I am happy to say that I still managed to beat him in wheelchair racing, even if it was only by a narrow margin.

"Loved, admired and respected, through his work in energy production, his humanitarian generosity, his academic curiosity and passion for inspiration and his wonderful, warm family, George P Mitchell will live on in the hearts and minds of all who knew him."

That's quite a legacy. If we want to be happy about CO2 emissions from energy plummeting, putting us back on a path where anthropogenic climate change becomes a distant memory, and Texas still being a world leader in physics today, we can thank a goat-farming immigrant. As Jim Pierobon at The Energy Collective put it, "you done good, real good."

 

Hank Campbell is the founder and editor of Science 2.0.

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Sat, 10 Aug 2013 19:48:27 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/71/A-fracking-pioneer%27s-environmental-dream.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/71/A-fracking-pioneer%27s-environmental-dream.html <![CDATA[A fracking pioneer's environmental dream]]> MASSACHUSETTS PROGRESSIVES may dream of stopping climate change by subsidizing clean-energy companies like Evergreen Solar and promoting affordable housing by requiring developers to rent or sell some units at below-market rates. In Texas, George P. Mitchell did much to achieve both those ends in far different ways — by bringing natural gas out of the ground and building a new city.

Mitchell died recently at age 94. But his life reminds us that entrepreneurs, when properly nudged and supported by public policy, provide our best chance of solving tough social problems.

Mitchell’s father was a Greek immigrant who ran a dry cleaning business in Galveston, and Mitchell inherited that enterprising streak. As a kid, he caught fish and sold them to Houston tourists who could claim those catches as their own. After graduating first in his class from Texas A&M and serving as an Army engineer in World War II, Mitchell started wildcatting.

The postwar natural gas boom was Mitchell’s first taste of doing good while trying to do well. In the 1940s, more than four-fifths of the homes in cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh were heated directly by coal. Those furnaces befouled the air. In 1940, St. Louis began requiring cleaner heating. Other cities followed, but critics feared the new rules would make ordinary life unaffordable.

Instead, the air got cleaner without breaking budgets because entrepreneurs like Mitchell generated a huge natural gas boom. Between 1940 and 1950, the share of Pittsburgh residents heating their homes with natural gas increased from 17 to 66 percent, while total US production of natural gas rose by 130 percent. Over his lifetime, Mitchell himself helped develop over 10,000 natural gas wells, and those wells helped keep America’s cities both warm and clean.

The next big chapter in Mitchell’s life occurred when he diversified into real estate, buying about 75,000 acres of timber land about 30 miles north of Houston. He dreamed of building a satellite city, and a $50 million loan guarantee from HUD made that possible. With the help of the visionary, environmentally oriented planner Ian McHarg, Mitchell built an edge city called The Woodlands that is both pleasant and affordable.

There is enduring irony in the fact that red-state Texas does much better at providing affordable housing than blue-state Massachusetts. The secret of Texas’ success lies in the unfettered building activities of people like Mitchell. Housing prices will stay close to construction costs if it is easy enough to build.

Starting from nothing 40 years ago, Mitchell’s town now has about 100,000 residents and over 37,000 housing units. During the last decade, The Woodlands’ housing stock has increased by over 16,000 units. Over the same decade, the housing stock in all of Massachusetts’ Middlesex County — population 1.5 million — grew by fewer than 36,000 units. Is it a surprise that housing costs 61 percent more in Middlesex County?

Mitchell is most famous, though, for his pioneering work in fracking — squeezing natural gas out of shale. Drillers have been injecting liquids into wells since the 1860s, and Halliburton patented a process in 1949. Steep gas prices during the 1970s raised interest in unconventional sources, and in 1978 the Department of Energy supported Mitchell’s experiments using massive hydraulic fracturing to extract gas from the tight rocks of Limestone County, Texas.

In 1981, only Mitchell saw promise in the hard rock of the Barnett Shale formation. Over the next 16 years, he invested $250 million in the field and earned little return. Finally, in 1997, with an innovative combination of horizontal drilling and slick-water fracking, the gas started coming. Mitchell had proven the viability of these techniques, and of the Barnett Shale as an energy source. Others rapidly followed. Today, Barnett produces over 30 percent of Texas’ natural gas output.

New supply means that gas prices have fallen and production has risen, and more gas has meant less coal. This switch from coal to gas has significantly reduced America’s carbon emissions. Climate change remains a real threat, and high energy prices remain painful, but Mitchell did as much as anyone to address both problems.

Mitchell’s successes still hint at some role for government: Fracking needs careful safeguards; his enterprises benefited from bans on dirty coal, a large HUD loan guarantee, and public support for research. Yet ultimately, Mitchell’s achievements remind us that a Texas entrepreneur, who supplied greener fuels and abundant housing, can do as much as anyone to solve America’s environmental and economic problems.

Edward L. Glaeser, a Harvard economist, is director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and an opinion columnist for The Boston Globe.

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Fri, 09 Aug 2013 15:29:08 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/70/George-Mitchell-A-man-who-quietly-helped-bankroll-the-Superconducting-Super-Collider-and-saved-the-Alpha-Magnetic-Spectrometer.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/70/George-Mitchell-A-man-who-quietly-helped-bankroll-the-Superconducting-Super-Collider-and-saved-the-Alpha-Magnetic-Spectrometer.html <![CDATA[George Mitchell: A man who quietly helped bankroll the Superconducting Super Collider and saved the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer]]> I’ve made no secret of my admiration for George Mitchell, the billionaire wildcatter who died last month. My reasons are simple: He was a thoughtful man who cared deeply about the Houston region, and who was genuinely curious about the natural world. He was different than a lot of us in that he had lots of personal wealth to devote to these interests.

In this weekend’s Chronicle I had a story about Mitchell, his relationship with Stephen Hawking, and the far-reaching investments he made in astrophysics in Texas. But the story didn’t capture the full range of interests Mitchell had, and the impact he has made on science, from the Superconducting Super Collider to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

Here, then, is a guest essay written by Texas A&M University physicist Peter McIntyre, who knew Mitchell well and benefited from his largesse. It’s long, but a good overview of Mitchell, and explains why his loss is so deeply felt by physicists.

In 1983 I had a dream – that we could build a supercollider for high energy research, in which beams of protons would be collided at 40 trillion volts of energy, and that we had the right technology and the right site to do it in Texas.  When I sought advice about how I might best put my ideas forward to the state, my colleagues suggested that I talk with George Mitchell.  I called his company in the Woodlands, asked form Mr. Mitchell, and after a few connections he came on the phone.  I was timid, I had never talked with a person of such wealth before, but George put me at my ease and asked what I had in mind.  I began explaining about quarks, and superconducting magnets, and 100-mile tunnels, expecting that at any moment I would hear a click on the other end of the line.  George asked a number of astute questions, then suggested that I come to his office the next day and discuss it more.

I came with my drawings and papers, and soon we were squatting on the floor of his office, he asking questions and becoming excited, I marveling that this man found my physics and technology interesting.  After an hour or two George said ‘I suppose you came to me to ask for some help.’  I said yes, people had told me he was a man of great vision.  He asked how much I needed to go the federal government with a major proposal for the next step.  I told him $3 million, expecting that would be the end of the meeting.  He said ‘I’ll give you half, and I think the Aggies should give you the other half.’  And with his help and persuasion they did.  In that one day, George Mitchell had launched a train of events that led to the commitment by the US to build the Superconducting Super Collider (which they later reneged upon after spending $2 billion).  That was a measure o of George’s vision, his capacity to look at ideas on their merit and prospects for opening new ways of seeing the world.

George supported us in creating a laboratory in the Woodlands, a new center in his Houston Advanced Research Center, where we developed accelerator technology for high energy accelerators.  He helped us to apply the same technology to make a new, more powerful magnet for magnetic resonance spectroscopy for biomedicine, a key tool in deciphering the structure of proteins for cancer research, and placing the unit into service at UT Medical Branch in Galveston.

One of George’s great passions was with astronomy, a fascination that began for him when he got a small telescope as a boy in Galveston.  He idolized Stephen Hawking, and he would call me whenever Hawking was quoted in the press and ask me to explain in clear terms what he was saying.  A day came when Chris Pope, a fellow professor at Texas A&M and Hawking’s first student, received a generous offer from another university seeking to lure him from us.  I called George and sought his help to persuade Chris to stay at Texas A&M.  George rose to the challenge, we structured the Mitchell Institute to provide a basis to build a new focal area of research and teaching at Texas A&M in astronomy and astrophysics, Chris stayed, and the Mitchell Institute was born.

Those moments were the beginning of an extraordinary era of generosity to Texas A&M, that culminated in hiring Nicholas Suntzeff, co-discoverer of Dark Energy, and six young world-class astronomers to our faculty, taking a share in the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope that will be the most powerful telescope on Earth, and building two beautiful architect-designed buildings for the home of the Physics Department and the Mitchell Institute.

George Mitchell pioneered the development of shale gas technology, with which the immense reserves of natural gas underlying shale deposits can be tapped.  He was developing that technology in his company in Houston during the same period when I would come every month or so to tell him how we were progressing with our supercollider technology.  George was a very involved person – when he supported something he wanted to know what you were doing and would suggest ideas and contact people to help in lots of ways.  I remember asking him on several such occasions what he was working on with his company. 

He was very modest in answer, saying just some new ideas for how to get natural gas that no one but he believed was down there.  I only learned later, when he had transformed the entire gas industry and America’s energy independence by making shale gas a success, that no one in the gas patch, no one in geophysics, and no one in the government labs had believed in his ideas, indeed most had ridiculed him. 

He persevered, he made it a success, and his driving force in that was not the vast wealth (although he had plenty of that), but the prospect of making our world a more sustainable place.  His vision for sustainability was another theme that ran through his life, his way of raising his family, and his choices for philanthropy.

Later in our friendship I would come to George to share my enthusiasms for new projects.  Sam Ting, Nobelist in Physics for the discovery of the charmed quark, asked me to help him prepare the superconducting magnet for his Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer that was being built to stage on the International Space Station.  I helped him with the magnet, and the experiment was prepared for launch, but NASA began cutting its launch schedule for the Space Shuttle and decided to cancel plans to launch AMS to the Space Station.  George helped us to identify key people in Congress and seek their help to persuade Congress to put AMS back on the launch plan. 

After two years of effort we succeeded, and earlier this year AMS discovered signals for an excess of high-energy positrons (the antiparticle of the electron that is in every atom) that signals the radioactive decay of a new heavy particle of nature.  We have not yet found that particle, or the new field of nature that it likely carries, but we are one step closer thanks to George Mitchell.

I tapped George’s passion for sustainability with my recent efforts to develop a technology with which to destroy the dangerous transuranic elements in the spent fuel from nuclear power plants.  Those transuranic elements are made during the same process that generates power in those plants, and they will pose an immense long-term hazard to life for 100,000 years into the future unless we can destroy them.  We are developing a way to destroy them by fission, using a new variation of the fission.  Our technology does not align well with the current thinking of the US government, and I would talk with George about my frustrations in what felt like pushing a heavy load up a hill to develop it.  George had a keen sense of humor, and he would always succeed in cheering me up in those times of frustration.

George P. Mitchell was one of the greatest Texans of all time, with a vision, and heart, and a mind to embrace the world, to do new things to make it a better place, and to care about friends and family along the way.

We will miss you, George

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Tue, 06 Aug 2013 14:10:36 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/69/Dot-Earth-Daniel-Yergin-on-George-Mitchell%27s-Energy-Innovations-and-Concerns.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/69/Dot-Earth-Daniel-Yergin-on-George-Mitchell%27s-Energy-Innovations-and-Concerns.html <![CDATA[Dot Earth: Daniel Yergin on George Mitchell's Energy Innovations and Concerns]]> On a hunch, George Mitchell began drilling shale rock formations in the Texas dirt fields where he had long pumped oil and gas.

As news spread over the weekend of the death of George P. Mitchell, the 94-year-old Texas oil man widely credited with playing a pivotal role in unlocking the shale energy era, I reached out for a reaction from Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer-winning chronicler of humanity’s fossil fuel era.

Read below for Yergin’s “Your Dot” contribution, which includes a link to an excerpt on Mitchell and fracking from his superb book, “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.”

But first click over to the fine obituary by my colleague Doug Martin and explore a timeline of Mitchell’s accomplishments posted by his family foundation. Loren Steffy has posted a fascinating deeper dive on Mitchell at Forbes that I also recommend.

Whatever your view of the risks and rewards offered by this method of liberating fuels from “tight” rock (the full range can be heard here), Mitchell’s life is one worth studying — including his stated concerns about the need for strict regulation of this process.

Here’s Yergin’s piece:

George Mitchell was the son of a Greek goat herder.  He started out after World War II with nothing except his brains and determination and a one-room office atop a Houston drugstore.  But before Mitchell was done, he launched what has proved to be the most important innovation in energy so far this century.  For Mitchell, who passed away at age 94, broke the code on shale gas and launched the unconventional revolution in oil and gas.  In so doing, he changed America’s energy position, making it possible to actually talk about United States “energy independence.”  As such, he has changed the world energy outlook in the twenty-first century and set in motion the global rebalancing of oil and gas that is now occurring.

In Chapter 16 of “The Quest,” I describe how this all came about.  In the early 1980s, Mitchell read a scholarly article saying that it might be possible to extract commercial gas from shale rock. Until then, people didn’t talk about “shale gas”; if it had any name, it was “uneconomic gas.”  The breakthrough did not come easily.  It took a decade and a half of conviction, investment, and dogged determination.  In the face of great skepticism, Mitchell refused to accept no as an answer.  The head of his development team told me that Mitchell “wanted us to figure a way” to get the gas out of a formation called the Barnett Shale. “If we couldn’t, then he would hire other people who could.”

The breakthrough on hydraulic fracturing came in the late 1990s.  In 2003, Devon Energy, which had acquired Mitchell’s company, yoked it to another technology, horizontal drilling, but it still took another half decade before it all really took off. The impact is now clear – both in terms of energy and environment.  United States natural gas production is up a third over the last decade. The country’s carbon dioxide emissions are back to the levels of the early 1990s, in large measure because moderately-priced natural gas has been taking market share away from coal in electric generation.  That is a direct result of the breakthrough on shale gas.

In my observation, Mitchell was a modest man. Although he had great success in business, I recall running into him sitting in coach on flights from Washington to Houston.  But he was certainly a man of strong views. And he was very committed to natural gas. He would call me up sometimes to criticize me for saying something he disagreed with, although I recall being hard pressed to know what exactly what had irked him so!

He was very committed to environmental values. He created The Woodlands, a 43-square-mile planned community north of Houston, and restored historic Galveston.  The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation has given away more than $400 million, much of it to support water and other sustainability initiatives and scientific research.  Just a few months ago, his foundation teamed up with that of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support “best practices” regulation of shale gas production.

In 2011, we gave Mitchell the first lifetime achievement award at our annual IHS CERAWeek conference.  Afterwards, he wrote me, “My energy career spanned more than six decades, so I deeply appreciated being recognized as an innovator…and pioneer of shale gas.”  A few months ago, I joined with others — including former Senator George Mitchell (no relation!), physicist Stephen Hawking and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone — to nominate him for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  In my letter, I wrote, “Were it not for George’s determination, we would be on course to spending $100 billion a year to import liquefied natural gas – and our oil imports would be going up and up. It is because of George that we can talk seriously about energy independence.”

Whether we achieve energy independence or get close to it is a matter of debate. But it is clear that one man’s determination – in this case George Mitchell’s – can have a very great impact and, in the process, overturn established opinion.  And, in his case, it has, with all the debates, changed the way our nation thinks about energy.

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Sun, 04 Aug 2013 14:16:37 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/68/How-a-goat-farming-immigrant-changed-everything.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/68/How-a-goat-farming-immigrant-changed-everything.html <![CDATA[How a goat-farming immigrant changed everything]]> In the dozens of articles and obituaries written about George Mitchell, who died late last month at 94, the Texas oilman, entrepreneur and philanthropist was remembered mostly as the "father of the fracking boom," whose innovations led to the shale-gas revolution.

But Mitchell was much more than that. Thanks to his innovative genius, the United States will soon become the world's leading producer of natural gas and by 2017 could be the leading producer of crude oil as well. In short, Mitchell – not to be confused with the former Senator from Maine – should be remembered as the individual who fulfilled the elusive promise of U.S. energy independence.

The son of an immigrant Greek goat herder who settled in Galveston, Texas, Mitchell studied petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University, where he graduated first in his class and developed an uncanny knack for finding oil.

He eventually established his own energy company and then, over the course of two decades, achieved something in the 1980s that almost no one else in the oil industry thought possible: He developed an innovative way of unlocking vast amounts of natural gas from shale formations. A similar method for extracting shale oil soon followed.

Mitchell opened the floodgates to shale-gas production by combining two decades-old technologies in a new and revolutionary way. Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," was first employed in natural gas production in Kansas in 1949. Horizontal drilling for gas dates even further back to the 1920s. Until Mitchell came along no one had succeeded in using the two technologies in tandem.

Mitchell's innovation was to drill straight down, then make a 90-degree turn thousands of feet underground to penetrate shale formations sideways. A mixture of water, sand and chemicals was then injected under high pressure, releasing the trapped gas.

Using his technique, U.S. energy producers from 2008 to 2012 were able to increase natural gas production by 20 percent and crude oil production by 30 percent, reversing the long downward trend in U.S. energy output. As production rose, prices fell. And today, the price of natural gas in the United States is two-thirds lower than the price in Europe and 80 percent lower than the price in Asia. Production projections for the years ahead are even greater.

None of the benefits of the shale revolution – not the economic gains from producing energy on a game-changing scale, not the hundreds of thousands of jobs created, not the more secure energy future, not the environmental benefits from dramatically reduced carbon emissions, not the prospect of natural gas displacing coal-burning electric power generation, not the monumental geopolitical consequences for the United States – would have been possible had it not been for Mitchell.

While large shale-gas deposits exist in other countries – notably Argentina, China, France, Mexico, Poland and South Africa – the shale revolution in the United States has been facilitated by a number of political and economic factors.

Despite our high corporate income tax rates relative to the rest of the world, the United States still enjoys an attractive investment climate in which individuals, not governments, own the natural resource they find and develop, providing a positive, incentive-driven environment for energy development.

Places where shale oil and gas deposits now are being exploited, such as North Texas's Barnett shale formation and the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, are not densely populated, a demographic condition distinctively missing in Europe.

Because oil and gas drilling has been ongoing here for more than a century, knowledge about the locations of shale "sweet spots" is readily available.

The United States already has an extensive pipeline network in place for moving natural gas from producing shale wells to retail markets.

And compared to the rest of the world, domestic energy companies face less of a threat of nationalization by governmental authorities.

The United States also has the management and technical expertise needed to expand energy output to meet the growing demand for oil and natural gas from India, China and the rest of the developing world.

Whether the shale-gas revolution will reach key states with huge shale resources, such as New York and California – which currently ban fracking – is a separate question. But it certainly has gotten the attention of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who recently warned that America's oil jackpot threatens OPEC's global market dominance.

If the U.S. shale boom means that oil and gas shortages become a thing of the past, it will be due in large part to George Mitchell, the father of American energy independence.

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Sun, 04 Aug 2013 14:10:15 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/67/Money-made-in-oil-Mitchell-dreamed-of-the-stars.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/67/Money-made-in-oil-Mitchell-dreamed-of-the-stars.html <![CDATA[Money made in oil, Mitchell dreamed of the stars]]> George Mitchell had an epiphany as he watched PBS a decade ago. There was Stephen Hawking, the world's most famous living scientist, being asked about his greatest disappointment. His answer? The U.S. government's failure to complete construction of the Superconducting Super Collider, near Waco, after spending $2 billion.

Mitchell, whose wealth played a key role in persuading the United States to build the collider, could relate.

So as Mitchell watched a physicist whom he idolized, awakening within him was a renewed desire to plumb mysteries at the edge of modern physics.

Obituaries written after Mitchell died last month endowed him with the legacy of a wildcatter who launched the present-day fracking boom. However, at the bookends of his life, Mitchell showed far more interest in the mysteries of the cosmos than in digging for oil.

And after 2002, when Hawking mentioned the super collider on PBS, Mitchell launched one of the greatest philanthropic campaigns to support basic science in Texas. Ever.

His deep pockets and enthusiasm helped Texas A&M University launch an astronomy program and gave the state a stake in the construction of the world's largest telescope, and his eventual friendship with Hawking elevated the profile of Texas among the exclusive club of cosmologists, some of the world's most brilliant thinkers who use mathematics to try to understand the earliest moments of the universe.

"He did incredible things for our reputation in the scientific world," said H. Joseph Newton, dean of science at Texas A&M University.

Galveston origins

In interviews about his interest in science, Mitchell always explained that cosmology was one of his first loves after staring at the stars from Galveston's beaches as a kid. At the time, scientists were just beginning to understand that our galaxy was one of billions of galaxies rather than unique.

"When I was just getting out of high school, I was very interested in cosmology," Mitchell said in 2009. "I read all that I could find out about it and even strongly considered becoming a physicist. But then I went out in the oil fields that summer with my brother, and I decided to go into petroleum engineering because I decided I had better go into something where I could make some money."

After attending Texas A&M he would make a lot of money in petroleum engineering, and, later, in developing The Woodlands.

Didn't hang up phone 

He made enough that, when A&M physicist Peter McIntyre called him out of the blue in 1983, Mitchell listened as the timid caller on the other end of the line explained about quarks, and superconducting magnets, and 100-mile tunnels.

"I was expecting that at any moment I would hear a click on the other end of the line," McIntyre recalled.

But Mitchell didn't hang up, and after a face-to-face meeting he gave McIntyre $1.5 million to move forward with a proposal to build a large collider in Texas to probe the most fundamental particles in nature. The federal government later agreed to build the massive collider before canceling the project in 1993 due to rising costs.

Mitchell was bitter, which is why Hawking's comments in 2002 resonated with him. After that TV program, he phoned McIntyre to talk about it, at which point McIntyre suggested they go and meet the great physicist, then visiting the California Institute of Technology, in person.

Meeting Hawking 

Hawking, who was skeptical of oilmen and had taken some delight in the fall of the energy company Enron, at first was uncertain about meeting Mitchell. But after the initial face-to-face meeting in 2002, the relationship quickly warmed.

Hawking had visited Texas once, in 1995, at the invitation of Ross Perot. During that trip he had stopped to visit Chris Pope, a physicist at A&M who had trained under Hawking.

Under an agreement between A&M and Cambridge University, where Hawking taught, the physicist would visit Texas more than half a dozen times after the 2002 meeting in California, giving several sold-out lectures. Hawking came to love the 5,650-acre ranch owned by Mitchell in Montgomery County, Cook's Branch Conservancy, where he and other elite physicists could gather in private and natural beauty to ponder the universe.

Mitchell's last gift to A&M, in fact, was $20 million to ensure such meetings would continue.

Since 2002 Mitchell has given nearly $100 million to A&M, endowing 10 chairs in physics and astronomy.

Among the biggest hires was Nick Suntzeff, one of the lead discoverers of dark energy, to oversee A&M's new astronomy program. Suntzeff and others encouraged Mitchell to help the university get a stake in the 80-foot Giant Magellan Telescope, one of three major efforts to build the next largest telescope in the world.

And so he did, investing $39 million in the project, allowing it to begin constructing mirrors and giving A&M and the University of Texas, whom Mitchell has encouraged to work together, time to use the telescope for observations when it is completed in Chile.

A rare interest

"None of this would have happened had George Mitchell not provided money for getting us into the Giant Magellan Telescope," said Suntzeff, explaining how his merely 7-year-old department is already gaining international recognition.

Mitchell's gifts also led to the construction of two modern buildings on A&M's campus, one of which houses the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy.

Many wealthy energy industry philanthropists spend their largesse in medical research, which explains why the Texas Medical Center is among the best in the world. But it's relatively rare for energy titans to have such a keen interest in basic science. Suntzeff recalled Mitchell explaining that some of his oil friends ribbed him about giving so much money to physics and astronomy.

"They said he should be giving back to petroleum engineering," Suntzeff said. "His response was that Exxon and Shell had a lot more money than he did, and they should be giving it to engineering. He wanted to support basic science."

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Sat, 03 Aug 2013 21:35:41 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/66/The-energy-visionary.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/66/The-energy-visionary.html <![CDATA[The energy visionary]]> For decades, the Barnett Shale was an enigma. Oilmen knew that the formation, which stretches for miles under north Texas, contained vast quantities of natural gas. But they wrote it off as too difficult and expensive to extract.

One man thought the opposite and spent 17 years figuring how to get it out. George Mitchell, the son of a Greek goat herder, was dismissed by many as a crank. In 1998, however, he was vindicated when his wells started disgorging gas in huge volumes, beginning a revolution that was to upend the energy industry in the US and beyond.

Mitchell, who has died aged 94, cracked the Barnett’s code by using hydraulic fracturing. Dubbing him “the Steve Jobs of the oil industry”, Daniel Yergin, the energy historian, says: “He changed the game in the face of enormous scepticism.”

For decades, his Mitchell Energy & Development had quietly pumped gas from a conventional field in Texas called the Boonesville Bend, which was depleting. In 1981, when he ordered his engineers to explore ways of tapping the Barnett – a deeper, less permeable formation – some of them balked. “He told us: ‘If you’re not capable, tell me, because I’ll find people who will be’,” says Dan Steward, Mitchell Energy’s exploration manager of the time. “He needed to know we were going to work like hell to get that gas.”

The following year the company started fracking in the Barnett. The technique – injecting chemicals, sand and water at high pressure to fragment underground rock and release the resources trapped inside – had been known since the 1940s. But success had never been achieved from unconventional oil or gas deposits before Mitchell came along.

The experiments were costly and the company was running out of money. Mitchell Energy’s board urged their chief to sell the Barnett properties. He refused, encouraging his team to continue tinkering with the process. They curbed the use of expensive gels and sand, and used water slickened with soap to reduce surface tension. The changes worked, and “by 2000, production had taken off like a rocket”, Mr Steward says. A year later, the company was acquired by Devon Energy for $3.5bn and Mitchell was a billionaire.

The Barnett methods were soon being used across the US, powering a surge in production. In 2000, shale gas accounted for just 2 per cent of US natural gas supplies: by 2012, that had risen to 37 per cent.

Mitchell was born in Galveston on May 21 1919. His father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, had moved to the US and found work on the railroads. But his long surname was a snag. “His paymaster said, ‘I’m not writing you one more pay cheque unless you change your name,’ so he took the paymaster’s – Mike Mitchell,” says Katherine Lorenz, George Mitchell’s granddaughter.

Though he grew up dirt poor, Mitchell was able to attend Texas A&M University to study petroleum engineering and geology. To fund his studies he worked as a waiter and a tailor, and sold fellow students gold-embossed stationery. After the second world war he set up an oil consulting business in Houston with his brother, often attracting investors at a downtown drugstore. They soon established a reputation for finding oil. In 1952, the company bought into acreage north of Fort Worth known as the Wildcatters’ Graveyard: with 13 successful wells, it discovered one of America’s largest gas fields.

Alongside his success, Mitchell had an early interest in sustainability. In 1974 he created a forested housing development north of Houston called The Woodlands, a pioneering sustainable community. “He used to say: ‘If you can’t get the world to work with 6bn people, how will it work with 10bn?’,” says Ms Lorenz. “He was really concerned with how to balance the need for economic development, environmental conservation and social justice.”

At times this put him at odds with the industry he helped to shape. Last August, he wrote in the Washington Post that there were “legitimate concerns” about the impact of fracking on water, air and climate – “concerns that industry has attempted to gloss over”. He risked the wrath of fellow oilmen by calling for better regulation of the process.

In 2011 he joined Warren Buffett’s initiative for billionaires to give away half their wealth. Indulging an interest in astronomy, he helped to fund the search for dark energy and gave $30m to the Giant Magellan Telescope, a ground-based Hubble replacement. Mitchell is survived by a sister, 10 children, 23 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. His wife, Cynthia, died in 2009,

By turning fossil fuel scarcity into plenitude, he made an enduring contribution to global energy security. “There were people all through the company who not only didn’t like what he was doing with shale – they hated it,” says Mr Steward. “But he was a visionary. He really seemed to be able to see far out into the future.”

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Sat, 03 Aug 2013 13:55:54 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/65/Few-businesspeople-have-done-as-much-to-change-the-world-as-George-Mitchell.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/65/Few-businesspeople-have-done-as-much-to-change-the-world-as-George-Mitchell.html <![CDATA[Few businesspeople have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell]]> THE United States has of late been in a slough of despond. The mood is reflected in a spate of books with gloomy titles such as “That Used to Be Us” (Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum) and “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent” (Edward Luce). For the first time in decades the majority of Americans think their children will be worse off than they are. Yankee can-do optimism is in danger of congealing into European nothing-can-be-done negativism.

There are good reasons for this. The political system really is “even worse than it looks”, as another doom-laden book puts it. Middle-class living standards have stagnated. The Iraq war turned into a debacle. But the pessimists are ignoring a mighty force pushing in the opposite direction: America’s extraordinary capacity to reinvent itself. No other country produces as many world-changing new companies in such a variety of industries: not just in the new economy of computers and the internet but also in the old economy of shopping, manufacturing and energy.

George Mitchell, who died on July 26th, was a one-man refutation of the declinist hypothesis. From the 1970s America’s energy industry reconciled itself to apparently inevitable decline. Analysts produced charts to show that its oil and gas were running out. The big oil firms globalised in order to survive. But Mr Mitchell was convinced that immense reserves trapped in shale rock deep beneath the surface could be freed. He spent decades perfecting techniques for unlocking them: injecting high-pressure fluids into the ground to fracture the rock and create pathways for the trapped oil and gas (fracking) and drilling down and then sideways to increase each well’s yield (horizontal drilling).

The result was a revolution. In an interview with The Economist last year Mr Mitchell said he never had any doubt that fracking might turn the American energy market upside down. But even he was surprised by the speed of the change. Shale beds now produce more than a quarter of America’s natural gas, compared with just 1% in 2000. America is on the way to becoming a net gas exporter. Traditional petro-powers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia are losing bargaining strength.

Mr Mitchell was the embodiment of the American dream. His father was a poor Greek immigrant, a goatherd who later ran a shoeshine shop in Galveston, Texas. Mr Mitchell had to work his way through university, but graduated top of his class. He left a fortune of more than $2 billion and a Texas landscape studded with examples of his philanthropy: he was particularly generous to university research departments and to Galveston.

Mr Mitchell was also the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit. He did not discover shale gas and oil: geological surveys had revealed them decades before he started. He did not even invent fracking: it had been in use since the 1940s. But few great entrepreneurs invent something entirely new. His greatness lay in a combination of vision and grit: he was convinced that technology could unlock the vast reserves of energy in the Barnett Shale beneath Dallas and Fort Worth, and he kept grappling with the unforgiving rock until it eventually surrendered its riches.

After studying petroleum engineering and geology Mr Mitchell served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the second world war. On returning to civvy street he displayed a mistrust of big organisations—he made a career with Texas’s scrappy independents rather than with the local giants—and a gambler’s cunning. In his early days he struck a deal with a Chicago bookmaker to buy rights to a piece of land known as “the wildcatter’s graveyard”, and quickly drilled 13 gushers.

His stubbornness was, though, his most important quality. Investors and friends scoffed, but he spent two decades poking holes in the land around Fort Worth. “I never considered giving up,” he said, “even when everyone was saying, ‘George, you’re wasting your money’.” Then, in 1998, with Mr Mitchell approaching his 80s, his team hit on the idea of substituting water for gunky drilling fluids. This drastically cut the cost of drilling and turned the Barnett Shale into a gold mine.

An unlikely environmental warrior

Yet Mr Mitchell’s story is more complicated than just a fable of hard work rewarded and a vision vindicated. It also shows how governments can help along the entrepreneurial spirit. His company counted on support from various government agencies, including those that mapped the shale reserves (demonstrating that they were plentiful) and promoted the development of technologies such as diamond-studded drill bits. Jimmy Carter’s 1980 law to tax “windfall profits” at oil firms also included a tax credit for drilling for unconventional natural gas.

Greens now protesting against fracking, in Britain and elsewhere, may be surprised to learn that Mr Mitchell was also an early believer in environmentally friendly growth. In 1974 he built a planned community, The Woodlands, in the pine forests north of Houston, in a bid to tackle the problems of urban sprawl. It contains a mix of social housing and offices as well as million-dollar villas. In his later years he also campaigned for tight government regulation of fracking: he worried that the wild men who ran the independents might discredit his technique by cutting corners and damaging the environment.

Mr Mitchell’s son, Todd, talked of “the Mitchell paradox”: he believed in population control but had ten children; he championed sustainability but never invested in renewable energy. Reconciling the tension between Mr Mitchell’s twin passions—fracking and sustainability—will be one of the great problems of the coming decades. But one thing is certain: the revolution he started by poking holes in the Texas dirt is changing the world just as surely as the algorithms being generated in Silicon Valley.

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Fri, 02 Aug 2013 01:01:31 UT
http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/64/Mitchell%27s-gamble-changed-an-industry-his-philanthropy-changed-the-future.html http://georgepmitchell.com/blog-entry/64/Mitchell%27s-gamble-changed-an-industry-his-philanthropy-changed-the-future.html <![CDATA[Mitchell's gamble changed an industry, his philanthropy changed the future]]> “Whatever you do, make sure you do it for the right reasons.”

That’s the last thing the late George P. Mitchell said to me when last May he was kind enough to grant me an hour-long interview by phone from his offices in The Woodlands.

Last week, at age 94, Mitchell died of natural causes. He leaves behind a legacy of world-changing innovation that started in Wise County. And even more important, a trail of philanthropy with a focus on the future. That innovation started with a hot tip from a bookie.

Mitchell was always meant to work in the oil field.

Before he even started classes at Texas A&M, he worked for a summer as a roustabout, a low-level jack-of-all-trades oil field man. He went on to graduate in 1940 with degrees in petrochemical engineering and geology, finishing first in his class, all while serving as captain of the tennis team. For years he worked with his brother Johnny in the oil field, drilling more than 1,000 wildcat wells. One day he got a call from a longtime friend and Jewish broker named Louis Pulaski about drilling in Wise County in the Boonsville Field. Mitchell called him General Pulaski after a Polish general who fought with the States in the American Revolutionary War

“North Texas was an interesting prospect,” Mitchell said. “General Pulaski called and said he had a tip from a bookie in Chicago. I told him I’d check it out.”

Before long Mitchell and several business partners purchased a 3,000-acre mineral lease on the Hughes Ranch in Wise County.

“We made a well, a very good well,” Mitchell said. “We found some gas, but not much oil. But we didn’t know what we had started.”

Within 90 days they purchased another 300,000 acres for $3 per acre.

“Before long all the gas above the Barnett Shale was played out,” Mitchell said.

But he knew there was much more below the surface, contained within the tight confines of the shale. But until then nobody knew how to get it out. They tried various fracturing techniques. They eventually tried water, and that worked. That’s why it’s called hydraulic fracturing. It opened up the technique of getting natural gas out of shales. Everywhere there are natural gas deposits there are shales, but the technique to get the gas out of the shales wasn’t developed until Mitchell. He was the first to drill into the Barnett. He figured out a way to speed up the geological process by thousands of years.

He proved life is about taking risk, and more importantly, making the most from the hand fate deals you.

In 2002, about 50 years after buying those thousands of acres of leases in western Wise County for $3 each, Mitchell sold his company to Devon for $3.1 billion.

And his hydraulic fracturing technique has changed the world. It’s generated billions in economic stimulus in North Texas alone. The technique has spread across the nation and across the world to China.

“It took years of experimenting,” Mitchell said. “And now it’s caused a revolution in oil and gas.”

But despite his mass accumulation of wealth, landing him on the Forbes list of 500 richest people in the world, he always remained down-to-earth, and was always willing to give back.

Over the years, he spent tens of millions rebuilding his hometown of Galveston, providing money to restore the city’s historic downtown Strand District. He donated land for Texas A&M University at Galveston. He donated another $35 million to TAMU Physics department at College Station resulting in the construction of two new science buildings.

His Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, established in 1979, has made more than $400 million in gifts.

In the early 1970s, Mitchell began developing The Woodlands, a suburban Houston master-planned community designed as a place for mixed-income residential development with jobs and amenities nearby while preserving the East Texas forest and other natural resources that covered the 27,000 acres.

He’s focused tremendously on securing a better, more sustainable future for the generations following him.

Although there are aspects of hydraulic fracturing that cause concern, such as water and air pollution, if done right, it’s a clean technology. It’s lifted and allowed this county, and many others, to prosper. But it won’t last forever. Mitchell had the foresight to invest in the future. We must invest sustainable, renewable energy sources in technology to last beyond the shale boom, and, like Mitchell, create a more secure future for the generations that follow us.

Like the oil and gas pioneer, we must remember to do things for the right reasons.

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Thu, 01 Aug 2013 13:11:14 UT