How One Engineer Changed the Oil Industry

 In this episode, we explore the transformative power of perseverance and innovation in the oil and gas industry and by the people who are willing to risk it all, highlighting how stubbornness and technological breakthroughs rewrote American energy history.

Key Topics

Hydraulic fracturing and its impact on energy production
The role of perseverance in technological breakthroughs
How industry failures lead to innovation
The history of the modern oil boom in America
The influence of individual engineers on industry evolution


Takeaways

Hydraulic fracturing was initially dismissed but became a game-changer.
Persistence in engineering can lead to industry-wide transformations.
Failures in traditional methods often pave the way for innovation.
The modern oil boom was driven by stubborn engineers who refused to quit.
Technological breakthroughs can redefine national energy landscapes.

Sound Bites

"They said hydraulic fracturing would never work."
"They said hydraulic fracturing would never work at scale."
"The modern oil boom did not start in Texas."

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Market Update
09:03 George P. Mitchell: The Father of Fracking
20:54 The Impact of Fracking on the Oil Industry
33:45 The Persistence of Innovators
49:46 Fracking: Expansion, Not Replacement
56:37 The Future of Natural Gas and AI

 resources

George P. Mitchell - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell
Mitchell Energy - History - https://www.energystar.gov/about/initiatives/mitchell_energy
Halliburton - Fracking Services - https://www.halliburton.com/en/solutions/fracking
The shale revolution - Article - https://www.energy.gov/eere/geoenergy/shale-revolution
Crude Logic Show - https://www.crudelogic.show

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yesterday we talked about the well that built the industry. Today, we're talking about the technology that rebuilt it. This is July 7th, 2026. Welcome back to the Crude Logic Show. Let's jump right into the market update for today.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Market Minute, West Texas crude is at 69.13. Brent's currently sitting at 72.69. Natural gas is at 325. The price of gasoline across the country has dropped to $2.97. And diesel prices are at $4.20 a gallon.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

We're going to call this story the man they said would never make it work. There were early attempts at fracking. It was used in limited conventional wells. They were very small-scale experiments. So, you know, kind of is an indication of the reluctance of the industry from that time frame to jump into this. There were no consistent commercial breakthroughs. So clearly it wasn't something that they could say, okay, we've had this breakthrough and it's going to work. They didn't really have any cases or situations, I guess, where that was going to be the industry standard. It was just an experimental thing. Most engineers believed that shale was too tight. Basically, the engineers thought that it was too hard to permeate the rock. Okay, everybody, calm down. The economics didn't work. Investors were reluctant. And this is sort of a theme early on in the oil and gas or the exploration for oil and gas. We noticed yesterday and in previous stories, there's always some element of the investors being reluctant. I'm sure that there's always an element of investors being reluctant, right? That's how they get rich. If they threw their money at everything, they'd be broke. So I get the reluctance, uh, but I'm just kind of pointing out that there is a naturally occurring theme here. And it's it still exists today, let's be honest. So, but but that's that's the whole of it, right? It was something new. People were not really sure it was going to work.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Speaking of the reluctance uh with what's been going on in Iran this year, it's been, I mean, it's been uh more much more of the same. I think usually that's the that's the theme, right? They're all all the investors get a little skittish or or whatever, but this year in particular seems to be much worse. Like they're there's plenty of people that we've been talking to that have like they're gonna start drilling this, you know, in February or whatever. And February came and went, and we'll go back into their office, talk to them, and oh, it's gonna be April, and then go back in in June, and they're like, Oh, we we canceled the whole plan. The investors got scared and backed out because there's so much uncertainty about the the oil prices with the Iran deal that they're they're afraid that the price is either gonna drop out right after they make their investment and then not make their money back as quick, or that it's gonna skyrocket and they're gonna miss their opportunities. You're right that it has not changed, but this year in particular seems a little worse than usual.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Are there different investors, even with big operators per well?

unknown 3:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

So I mean, I'm sure that they probably have packages and bundling and things like that, but I'm saying like they could literally like do they seek investors each even these big companies, or is that really more for small operators?

SPEAKER_01 3:13

No, I I think it's for everybody. I I only know I I actually always wondered that too, because I thought publicly traded companies would probably have, you know, publicly traded money. But I found out this year, actually, so the smaller companies, they almost all exclusively operate on either their own private budgets that, you know, it's some wealthy guy who's been saving for years that decided to start an old company, drill a single well or something. Or the majority of the smaller ones are are funded by, you know, private equity firm firms or whatever. However, this last year I learned that one of the major, major players here in Midland goes out and gets a per well investment from multiple investors.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

We're going to be talking about George P. Mitchell, who's known as the father of fracking in our industry. Fracking is not a foreign concept now, but it was back when George P. Mitchell was trying to prove the concept. He didn't create the concept, he basically perfected it. The idea of fracking was attempted on small levels from the 1940s to the 1980s without much success and without any really broad expansion or implementation. So George thought that these pockets of natural gas that were trapped in shell rock, he thought that it could be extracted and he thought that it could be done in an economic way that would improve the industry and decrease the cost because before fracking, we had basically a straight-hole mentality. We have a conventional wells and unconventional wells. A conventional well is a naturally occurring formation somewhere. Unconventional is what we're talking about with fracking. Unconventional means that the fossil fuels exist. They are in little pockets or areas that need to be extracted, but they're not going to naturally occur. So there has to be some sort of event to get that out of the rock. And hydraulic fracturing was the answer. Enter the explosives. Boom. While these experiments were taking place and people like George Mitchell were trying to get the concept off the ground, it was met with a lot of skepticism. Investors were afraid to invest in it. It wasn't a really widely used thing on a lot of wells. This was this straight hole mentality was basically let's find out where it naturally is, let's go extract it and get out. He wanted to get this to be more of a prominent part of the industry. He drained himself of a lot of money. A lot of people were telling him to stop, that it wasn't going to work. And luckily for the industry, that wasn't good enough for him. And he decided to keep going. So George Mitchell, he really had this sort of independent mindset. He uh continued funding experiments when others stopped. So this was you know part of the problem. It's part of the problem with the oil field.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Like the guy the guy succeeded because he was just stubborn and refused to quit, you know?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yeah. But isn't that sort of the wildcatter mentality?

SPEAKER_01 6:25

It definitely is. Yeah, it's definitely the wildcatter mentality. But it, I mean, you you and I know this. So like everybody sees the George Mitchell of the world and they see all the success they have and the and the fact that it worked, right? But they don't see all the guys that have the same mentality that we work with day in and day out. You're like, you're stubborn jackass, that's not gonna work. And then they do it their own way and they go out of business and bankrupt.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Some of the richest people that are in this industry refuse to take no for an answer. There were a lot of people that thought that even if this could be done, that it wouldn't be an economical method, that it would basically the cost would would really outweigh the reward. So this is why it took quite a while for it to gain steam. And nobody in the oil and gas industry, or really any industry, but specifically the oil and gas industry, nobody's going to really widely adopt anything until somebody's proven it, which is why people like George P. Mitchell are necessary, because we may we may still be doing things the old way today if people like George Mitchell didn't exist, because everybody was doubtful that it would work, right? And we we've met plenty of people. I'll be I'm one of them, I'm a skeptic. You got to really prove things to me before I think it's going things are going to work, even if they make sense, right? Proof is in the in the actual result. I went the other way. I did the whole stubborn it'll work. I'm out of money. Damn it. Yeah. I need to find investors. Mitchell founded this company. It was an independent oil and gas company in Texas, and it was called the Mitchell Energy Development Corporation. Later, when he sold it, it became a name we all know pretty well, Devin Energy. So the the roots go back a ways. He became convinced that the enormous gas reserve locked inside the Barnett shell could be produced if engineers found a better way to fracture the rock. We know now that the Barnett was a massive producer. There were wells all over the Barnett for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Yeah, that was a lot, that was some of the most fun I've had, like as far as being on a rig and coordinating everything. That was the most fast-paced environment that I've been involved in. So it was a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

It was the funnest place to visit rigs, too. It was right there in the middle. I mean, it's, you know, there's there's so many rigs, they're just right there in town, you know, in the city. He basically developed his own or started his own company. Uh throughout the 80s and 90s, he did experiments. His company experimented relentlessly, spending millions of dollars while enduring the failures and skepticism. The breakthrough came when his team combined horizontal drilling with a lower cost slick water hydraulic fracturing.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

It's so it's weird looking back at it now, man. Like because we've been doing it now for so long. I mean, it's been 20 years since the Barnett shell.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

It's been it's been such a long time of doing it this way that it seems like the obvious choice. You know, like you you drill a horizontal well, you you frack it, it all comes into that well bore, the pressure from the formation's pushing it up the hole. Like, why didn't we think of this before? But at the time, I can see I can see skeptics going, okay, well, you the geological study says that there's oil over here 100 yards, and there's oil over here, you know, 300 yards, and you're not gonna get all of them. What are you gonna do? Just snake between them and like directionally drill to each pocket. It's never gonna work. If you told me you were gonna drill a hole in the ground, put some C4 in some giant BBs and try to blow the BBs to those areas and create a straw for the oil to flow through, I'd be like, okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

You know, I mean, but now we do it daily. We talk about fracking, like we talk about breathing, right? George Mitchell burned through millions. It was obviously worth taking the risk. The big breakthrough that Charles Mitchell had is when he combined horizontal drilling with the lower cost slick water hydraulic fracturing technique. Instead of the expensive gel-based fluids, they discovered the mostly water, sand, and small amounts of additive could create fractures more efficiently at a much lower cost. The takeaway that we really want everybody to get about George Mitchell is that he revolutionized not only an industry, but the way we live. We're now able to extract more fossil fuels at a cheaper price. So this totally expanded the industry. Everybody listening to this who is in the industry, you already know. You pull up to a site where fracking is taking place, and there are tons of trucks, tons of people, tons of equipment. All of those things come from somebody somewhere. So this really expanded it. Modern shale wells now require drill crews, frack crews, wireline, coil tubing, logistics, water hauling, sand supply chains, and data monitoring systems. One shale well is not one job, it's an entire temporary economy. So it's it's creating a lot of things for the economy, not just the industry. This also caused a rise in service companies. There was an explosion of service companies because of all the things that I just mentioned, all those roles that had to take place now on a shale well. Those had to be provided by somebody. So these service companies started popping up. Some of the bigger ones, like Halliburton, huge into fracking. Halliburton jumped right in. Um, and then of course all the other big service companies and things too. And then just independent fracking companies came up. Really, it kind of exploded the oil field in a way that had not happened in the past.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

This uh this is the concern every time we get a new technique in the industry or a new service line like fracking or whatever. There, there's always this concern that it's all gonna be temporary. For the last 20 years, it's been the industry standard, and we are there's always a concern that it's gonna be temporary and that you know, we're gonna hire all these people, we're gonna get all the wells fracked, and then what are we gonna do? They're just gonna have to be laid off and it's all gonna come to an end. But every time something big happens, like this time, maybe it's AI. Maybe AI has the opposite effect, and it doesn't wind up cutting jobs, it winds up expanding the industry. That's how it was with fracking. Everybody thought he was just wasting his time and this is never gonna work, and all of your poor employees are gonna be out of a job, and now we don't have enough people to frack wells. We talked about this at the beginning of the episode. It's what drives the industry forward, it's what drives more people to push and find the next level. And right now we're drilling wells at 10,000 vertical depth and you know, four or five miles long, eight miles. According to Google, right now the longest well ever drilled is 9.4 miles. Not sure how accurate that is. But anyway, I mean, we're drilling longer and and farther than we ever have, but we're not necessarily going too much deeper and then horizontal. So maybe the next thing is we find, you know, we get better geological tools and we find oil deeper. We find a more valuable substance deeper, and we, you know, we're gonna need the technology and the fracking to do that. The individual jobs themselves are a temporary thing, right? They move the frack crew on, they frack the wells, they leave. But the technology as a whole is gonna be something that's used in the industry going forward. And with all the data centers and the AI and all the power consumption that's coming across the globe, you're never gonna get rid of oil and gas. So you're gonna need oil and gas and nuclear and solar and wind, wave, and everything else to power all this.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

So yeah, I mean, they've they've said, and it's widely reported, AI data centers, it's going to require a very high usage of natural gas. Obviously, oil is still involved with all the things that are made and all that stuff. But in order to run these AI data centers, they're apparently going to need an influx of natural gas. So if that is true, then we're going to see a spike, I think, in drilling for and producing natural gas. Oil's always going to be there. Gas is always going to be there. But I think we're going to see more exploration and different ways to extract natural gas because these AI data centers are going up like crazy. And I don't think the demand is going to match with the supply. I think we'll have the supply, but I don't, I think there's going to be a much greater demand, which obviously says you're going to need a greater supply. So uh, you know, the the natural gas thing is to be determined. What is the modern implication? Shale didn't make oil easier, it made it faster, more data-driven, and more operationally complex. So the question to our listeners and viewers is shale the final evolution of onshore drilling or just the first version of something even more advanced?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

So, right now the World Cup, as we all know, is in full swing. We're deep into the knockout rounds at this point. What lies underneath all of that? The FIFA World Cup has never played a game on anything but grass, right? So for the last year or half of a year, they have been ripping out turf.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Unfortunately, the U.S. has now been eliminated from the World Cup. That really sucked. It was a terrible match. I'm not a soccer fan at all. So I can go back to not caring about soccer. If the USA is playing, I'm gonna cheer them on. But I noticed in not just that game, but another game, another couple of games I watched, mid-game, sprinklers are shooting up, watering, and I thought they were they're they're in NFL stadiums. I thought they were playing on turf. So they must have brought grass in.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

That's exactly what I was about to get to. So earlier this year, FIFA started ripping out artificial turf at about half of the NFL stadiums across the country. Atlanta tore theirs out completely. Boston dug up 10 inches of gravel that says underneath their turf, and Dallas flew grass in from Colorado over 800 miles, just so some guys could play some soccer on real grass. So that got me thinking, why did we ever switch from grass to turf to begin with? And I found out some interesting information. In Houston, 1965, the Astrodome opened. It was considered the eighth wonder of the world at the time, but somebody who helped design it forgot a very important detail. Grass needs sunlight. And since there was no sunlight, the grass in the astrodome died about a week after it was installed. So every game, the first season, the night before the game, they would go out on the field and spray paint it green and then spray paint white stripes on it. So at the time, this is this is where it gets even better. Monsanto was already tinkering with a synthetic grass that at the time they called chemgrass. It was made for inner city playgrounds where real grass would never survive just due to high traffic and sunlight and normal damage, right? Which funny enough was a nice change of pace for them because they were the people who made Agent Orange and Vietnam. And so they went from like wiping out forests to building playgrounds. The Astro Dome needed to fix chemgrass is who they chose. And since it was the Astro Dome, it became known as AstroTurf, which is why we call it AstroTurf today. Fast forward to today, and these perfect little blades of grass are in every NFL stadium across the country. They're made from nylon and polypropylene. They are a straight chemical product built off the backs of petroleum feedstocks. The backing underneath it is uh polyurethane, also made by us, the industry. Uh rubber pellets sit underneath it to give you to give the cushion, and it's made from recycled tires, which is also made by us. Um I say us, I mean like me and you did it, but you know what I mean. The oil and gas.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Yeah, well, we have the potential to do it.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Right. I don't have the desire. Or the money. Or the money. Yeah. So anyway, basically the entire field is a byproduct of oil and gas. It still works to this day, and it's why NFL stadiums use it, right? We've been able to take stadiums uh indoors and to deserts. It handles nonstop heat and sunlight, you know, day in and day out. But there's been a lot of complaints, and the NFL PA has the data to support it. 92% of players in the latest survey say that they would prefer to play on grass. And it's a conversation that the NFL has been having for quite a while. But I feel like those conversations kind of overshadow what the product actually pulled off. They took stadiums out of places that they never would have had a game, and they built deserts and domes and hundreds of degree afternoons, and they made all of these venues that we currently watch Monday night, Thursday night, Sunday night football in. And it didn't just build a field in the middle of a desert. That is that in itself is impressive enough, right? But you put a stadium in the middle of the desert and you build an economy around it. So it it held up week after week for over 50 years now and is still running strong today. And every bit of it, the backing, the fiber, the cushion, everything about it comes from the oil and gas industry. Whether that's an NFL stadium or a World Cup pitch or a kid's playground, AstroTurf is durable, weatherproof, and built to take a beating. And if you check the label, you'll know exactly who to thank.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Before we go any further, we want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Pump Jack Apparel, for today's episode. If you are looking for apparel for the oil field, if you're just looking for general apparel, if you're looking to do one-off runs, ball caps, shirts, they have their own line of apparel. Whatever you're looking for, they can meet your apparel needs. If you want to work with an apparel company that knows and understands the oil field, pumpjack apparel is your source. You can find them at pumpjackaparel.com. We like to close all of our episodes out with a quote of the day The biggest breakthroughs in energy don't come from certainty, they come from persistence. And George P. Mitchell is the perfect example of persistence. Today we talked about how he revolutionized the hydraulic fracturing process. He is known affectionately as the father of fracking in the industry. He really did change everything through his persistence, his willingness to take risks, and it turned out to benefit all of us. Not only that, but there are several products out there that we interact with every single day that we would not be able to function like we do now without the oil and gas industry. And today's product of artificial turf is just one of those examples. We want to thank everybody for taking the time to watch or listen today. We want to specifically thank our subscribers. We appreciate every single one of you. If you would like to subscribe to our channel, you can find us at Crude Logic Show on YouTube and on social media. So please share this with someone you know, share it with somebody else in the field, give us some feedback, tell us if we're going down the right track or not. If you want to see certain stories, if you think certain segments are a good idea, if there's information you want to know, please let us know. You can like, follow, share, and subscribe. Tomorrow we go back in time to the wildest gamblers the oil field has ever seen. These Wildcatters who risked everything on a hole in the ground. Before Shell, before Giants, before pipelines, there were men drilling blind, betting everything, and sometimes striking millions. That's going to be Wildcat Wednesday. Thanks for joining us. And remember, stay safe, keep drilling, and it's only logic if it's crude logic.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

From the burning back to the rock and mouse tools, we're gonna stop doing we're ready to go.