He was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1919, the son of Greek immigrants, and he died there in July 2013 at age 94, a billionaire. But through the years in between, oh what a life!

George P. Mitchell has been highly praised since his passing. Tributes have stacked up from oil and gas industry executives who owe so much to the so-called Father of Fracing. Others have mentioned his lifelong love of science, especially of astronomy and physics; and his study of sustainability—the greatest example of which is The Woodlands, a master-planned community north of Houston that has been emulated by urban planners around the world.

Mitchell could see far and connect the dots. Source after source cites his visionary nature, always looking out 30 years. To him, the environment, and sustainable development of oil and gas fields and real estate communities, all fit into one philosophy.

In August 2012, Mitchell and co-author New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg published an Op-Ed in The Washington Post and other major papers defending the safety and efficacy of hydraulic fracturing—but true to his own environmental activism, at the same time Mitchell urged the industry to adopt and adhere to best practices.

Mitchell and Bloomberg wrote, “Fracing for natural gas can be as good for our environment as it is for our economy and our wallets, but only if done responsibly. The rapid expansion of fracing has invited legitimate concerns about its impact on water, air and climate—concerns that industry has attempted to gloss over. With so much at stake for the environment, jobs and energy security, it is critical that we make reasoned decisions about how to manage the use of hydraulic-fracturing technology.

"We can frac safely if we frac sensibly. That may not make for a great bumper sticker. It does make for good environmental and economic policy.”

It was Mitchell’s E&P company, Mitchell Energy & Development Corp., that experimented doggedly for 17 years to create the “overnight success” of the Barnett shale of North Texas. Their eventual success led the oil and gas industry into a leasing and drilling frenzy from roughly 2004 to today, as shale plays in other basins were developed.

Today, the industry is in a tremendous harvest mode, with thousands of wells yet to be drilled in each shale play, and the U.S. economy is benefiting. Domestic oil and gas production has steadily risen since that time. There is serious talk of energy independence, of exporting natural gas in the form of LNG (liquefied natural gas) and of exporting refined petroleum products.

“George Mitchell dramatically changed America’s energy position,” said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS CERA and founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, upon learning of Mitchell’s passing. In 2012, Yergin and others had proposed that Mitchell receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to science and to the energy industry.

Throughout his career, Mitchell participated in drilling some 10,000 wells, including more than 1,000 wildcats. Mitchell Energy was credited with more than 200 oil and 350 natural gas discoveries. The firm spent nearly two decades developing hydraulic fracturing, finally finding success in North Texas’ Barnett shale formation in the 1990s.

It is not often that one man makes such an indelible mark on an industry or community, so it is rare indeed that Mitchell did this in so many different spheres, from energy technology to environmentalism to sustainable urban development to astrophysics. He co-funded some of the mirrors on the giant Magellan telescope, for example.

He was known for his keen intellect—graduating from Texas A&M in 1940 first in his class, and captain of the tennis team. Years later, he started and endowed the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), aiming to create a “Silicon Valley” hotbed of innovation in Texas. Late in life, he counted the famed physicist Stephen Hawking among his friends. Mitchell wanted A&M to compete with elite universities on both coasts of the U.S., he said, and he declared he’d make it happen. He donated $52 million for construction of two buildings for the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy.

Mitchell came from modest roots. He sold stationery and candy to get through college, yet he made philanthropy and education keystones of his life, especially after he sold his Fortune 500 company, Mitchell Energy, to Devon Energy Corp. in 2002 for $3.5 billion.

To combat poverty, and because he was interested in urban planning and preserving the environment, in 1975 he opened The Woodlands, one of the most successful mixed-use “New Towns” in the U.S. He envisioned more than a bedroom suburb—instead, a full-blown town where people live, work and play among the trees. All power lines are underground, billboards are prohibited, and trees are preserved in all developments. Today this park-like atmosphere is home to about 120,000 people.

And he spent millions on historic preservation in his hometown, Galveston, helping to revive its once-moribund economy and re-instituting Mardi Gras each spring. Earlier this year, he attended the annual ball in costume and face paint, as he always did.

But for the oil and gas industry, it is his early work, figuring out how to drill and produce the Barnett shale in the Fort Worth Basin, for which he will be remembered. Fracture technology has ended up being the key to unlocking shale formations around the world.

“There’s no point in mincing words. Some people thought it was stupid,” Dan Steward, a geologist who joined Mitchell Energy in 1981, told The Associated Press in an interview last year.

Steward estimated that in the early years, “probably 90% of the people” in the firm didn’t believe shale gas would be profitable, and that Mitchell’s company didn’t even cover the cost of fracing on shale tests until the 36th well was drilled. “There’s not a lot of companies that would stay with something this long,” he said. “Most companies would have given up.”

In 1981, Mitchell Energy culminated years of experimentation when it drilled the C.W. Slay No. 1, which became the discovery well for the Newark East (Barnett shale) gas field. It was drilled to about 7,800 feet, in the southeast corner of Wise County, Texas, southeast of the large and established Boonsville (Bend Conglomerate) gas field. Mitchell had been drilling vertical gas wells in this county since the 1950s, when he started his company.

“There were many times during its early life that the Barnett play was on the verge of failing, and had it not been for the conviction, commitment and determination of George P. Mitchell and Mitchell Energy, it would not be what it is today,” writes Steward, in his history, “The Barnett Shale Play: Phoenix of the Fort Worth Basin” (published by the Fort Worth and North Texas geological societies in 2007).

A number of developments contributed to Mitchell’s eventual success. Fracture-stimulation technology was advancing. In 1979, Mitchell performed the nation’s largest hydraulic frac of that era, in Limestone County in East Texas, using gelled water, with 1 million gallons of fluid and 2.8 million pounds of sand. Also, geological thinking kept advancing. He and other geologists had begun to suspect that the Barnett shale underlying the North Texas region was the source rock for the oil that was being produced at the time.

By 1987, Mitchell had drilled 36 wells in the Barnett without yet booking commercial reserves, Steward writes. Starting in 1990, Mitchell and the Gas Research Institute agreed to work together on Barnett research and development for another 10 years. With this assistance and funding from the federal government, more wells were drilled. Each time, different frac techniques were tried, and reservoir modeling and mapping were done.

By 1992, Mitchell’s team believed it had 50 billion cubic feet per square mile of gas in place in the Fort Worth Basin, so it approached the Texas Railroad Commission to obtain permission for 80-acre spacing in Newark East Field. By 1994, the Barnett had replaced the Bend Conglomerate as the main source of new gas production for Mitchell in North Texas.

Mitchell acquired 500 square miles of 3-D seismic data in North Texas, and about half of that data was applicable to the Barnett. Foam fracs were changed to light sands fracs; down-hole motors were used; other new ideas were tried.

The Devon deal

Through the 1990s, Mitchell’s team continued to expand and experiment with the Barnett shale, spending millions of dollars.

Their success culminated in the $3.5-billion sale of the entire company to Devon Energy Corp. in 2002. The shale took off after that, when Devon applied horizontal drilling.

At a tribute dinner for George Mitchell at Hart Energy’s DUG Conference in Fort Worth in 2008, Devon’s then-chairman, Larry Nichols, spoke of the deal:

“We all know who the pioneer was in this play: It was George Mitchell….he persevered for almost 20 years. In 1999, George tried to sell Mitchell Energy…it was a failed sale—no one bought it. We looked at it and didn’t buy it.

“But then, we looked at it again later. I noticed Mitchell’s gas production kept increasing and I asked my guys to look into why. Devon bought it in 2002, and Wall Street yawned. One analyst even said we’d blow our brains out on it.

“Our plan was to take the hydraulic fracturing that George had begun and use that technique in the core area…In 2003, we drilled the first horizontal well in Johnson County. By 2007, we were the first company to drill 1,000 horizontal wells out of a total of 4,000 drilled by the industry there.”

By year-end 2007, some 8,900 wells had been drilled in the Barnett shale, up 36% from the year before. A five-year leasing and drilling frenzy ensued across the U.S. as producers looked for other shale plays—and found them in the Haynesville, the Woodford, the Fayetteville, the Eagle Ford, Bakken, Marcellus and Utica.

Shale production has revolutionized the U.S. gas market and is starting to do so for crude oil as well. The Potential Gas Committee said this year in its latest assessment that the U.S. gas potential resource climbed to 2,384 trillion cubic feet, the highest in the study’s 48-year history.

The shale story is still being written, but it was George Mitchell and his team who opened the first chapter.

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