One of America’s wealthiest men Greek American George P. Mitchell – the man who revolutionised oil exploration through fracking – died on July 26 in Galveston, Texas. He was 94.
Mitchell was the son of a Greek immigrant whose family migrated from Greece to the USA in the 1900s – a time when a vast majority of Greek nationals were turning to America for opportunities. And, unbeknownst to his father, George Phydias Mitchell was set to become one of the wealthiest men in the US.
Born in Galveston on May 21, 1919, Mitchell’s parents, who had come to the United States from Greece separately around 1900, ran a shoeshine parlour in Galveston. His father, soon after arriving in the United States, took the name Mike Mitchell from an employer handing out paychecks who couldn’t say his real name, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, according to an article in the Houston Chronicle.
Mitchell developed an interest in oil and gas while working in the oil fields for his older brother, Johnny, around age 17. He graduated in 1940 with a degree in petroleum engineering and an emphasis in geology from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, now known as Texas A&M University, in College Station.
After serving in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, Mr Mitchell in 1946 joined a newly formed oil exploration company, Oil Drilling, which eventually became Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. and went public in 1972. Mitchell and his brother were early partners in the company.
Mitchell participated in about 10,000 wells over his career. His company drilled its first well in the Barnett Shale in 1981 and developed fracturing and horizontal-drilling techniques to unlock gas trapped beneath hundreds of feet of rock, according to Mitchell’s company.
In his late 80s, Mr Mitchell turned his attention back to another shale play, this time bankrolling rigs in the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania for a company headed by his son Todd and Joe Greenberg, a geologist. The Marcellus Shale formation has since emerged as the largest US gas resource, holding the equivalent of 330 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas, according to ITG Investment Research.
The new abundance of cheap gas transformed the US industrial landscape, prompting new investment in power plants that use gas to generate electricity and accelerating the demise of older coal and nuclear plants that were more expensive to repair and operate.
His dogged pursuit of the natural gas he and others knew were trapped in wide, thin layers of rock deep underground brought a new – and enormous – trove of oil and gas within reach.
His controversial breakthrough led to a revolution in oil and gas production in the US, one that is expected to migrate around the world. The US is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and is on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer by the end of the decade, according to the International Energy Agency.
The fracking boom sent natural gas prices plummeting, reducing energy costs for US consumers and businesses. And by boosting US oil production, it has sharply reduced oil imports.
It has led to a dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury in the US by replacing coal in electric power generation.
At the same time, some environmentalists worry the fracking process or the disposal of fracking wastewater can leak into drinking water supplies and contaminate them.
Mr Mitchell’s idea was to go directly to the sedimentary rock holding the oil and gas, essentially speeding up geological processes by thousands of millennia.
He figured out how to drill into and then along layers of gas-laden rock, then force a slurry of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock to crack it open and release the hydrocarbons. This process, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is now common industry practice.
Engineers after Mr Mitchell learned to adapt the process to oil-bearing rock.
A family statement said Mr Mitchell “will be fondly remembered for flying in the face of convention – focussing on what could be, with boundless determination – many times fighting through waves of scepticism and opposition to achieve his vision”.
For the entire oil and gas age, drillers had searched for hydrocarbons that had seeped out of layers of sedimentary rock over millions of years and collected into large pools. Once found, they were easy to produce. Engineers merely had to drill into the pools and the natural pressure of the earth would send huge volumes of oil and gas up to the surface.
“He was a visionary,” said James Rebello, who worked at Prudential Securities when it financed a small part of the exploration and production side of Mr Mitchell’s group.
This year, the annual Forbes list of wealthiest Americans ranked Mitchell 239th.
Sources: Huffington Post, Forbes, Bloomberg