Fracking’s Graceland
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It doesn’t look like the starting point for a revolution, but this well, the C.W. Slay #1, is where America’s energy renaissance began. The C.W. Slay #1 was the first well drilled into the Barnett Shale in 1981 by Mitchell Energy and Development. If you’re wondering why Saudi oil installations can come under attack in 2019 and gasoline prices in the U.S. haven’t spiked to more than $4 a gallon, it all comes back to this well.
It would be another 17 years before George Mitchell and his team figured out fracking and unleashed the natural gas reserves in the Barnett. But this is the well that convinced George Mitchell that the gas was there and made him determined to find a way to produce it.
Here’s what I write about the well in my book George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet, which is available for pre-order now and will be in bookstores Oct. 11:
The C. W. Slay #1 juts upward through sparse, open prairie, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The wellhead itself is only about six inches in diameter, capped by a steel valve painted a drab gray green and faded from years of scorching North Texas sunshine. Far to the southeast, barely visible on the horizon, are the skyscrapers of
downtown Fort Worth.
Mitchell Energy and Development Corp. drilled the natural gas well in 1981, piercing the Barnett Shale formation about 7,500 feet below the scrubby surface. The company operated hundreds of other wells in the area, but this one was different. This one changed the world, although it would be two decades before anyone—including company namesake George P. Mitchell and his geologists and engineers—
realized it.
Today, to workers in the neighboring gas fields, the C. W. Slay #1 is something akin to Graceland for Elvis fans. The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, requires companies to post a sign declaring the name of each well, the amount of acreage in the lease, the identifying number that the commission assigns to it, and an emergency phone contact. As the fracking boom raged across North Texas from 2006 to 2014, thieves who were obviously well versed in industry lore often repeatedly stole the metal marker on the C. W. Slay #1.
To those unfamiliar with the energy business, the well is unremarkable. It’s hard to pick out from among dozens of similar wellheads nearby. But with the C. W. Slay #1, Mitchell Energy, a little-known, midsized natural gas producer, took the unconventional first steps that would shake up global energy markets as dramatically as the Middle Eastern oil embargoes that dominated the 1970s. The C. W. Slay #1 and the subsequent wells drilled into the Barnett formation laid the foundation for the “shale revolution,” proving that natural gas could be extracted from the dense, black rock thousands of feet underground.
Fracking, the process for unlocking those gas reserves in commercial quantities, came later. It would be almost a quarter century, in the late 1990s, before George Mitchell and his team perfected the process that transformed the energy landscape.
