About twenty years ago, I had the opportunity of meeting George Mitchell in Houston, Texas. George Mitchell who recently died at age 94 was an engineer who has dramatically impacted the oil and natural gas industry. George Mitchell was known as the father of hydraulic fracturing.
George was highly respected in the oil and gas industry. In fact, in the 30 plus years that I have been traveling to Houston on energy business, whenever George Mitchell’s name was mentioned I only heard positive remarks. He was truly a gentleman.
I share with you some of the remarks taken from his obituary, about his life:
“He was one of the elite corps of engineers whose ideas, ingenuity and persistence changed the world. He was the father of “fracking”, hydraulic fracturing, the process by which dense shale rocks deep underground are blasted apart to release the gas and oil trapped within.
His innovations, developed over several decades, started an engineering revolution that is transforming the US from a guzzler of imported fuel to an energy-independent nation. His influence along with his innovations in getting hard-to-reach fossil fuels out of the ground, have arguably had more effect on US foreign policy than any statesmen since the start of the cold war.”
He was born in Galveston, Tx., and was the son of poor Greek immigrants.
He gave back through his charitable foundation giving over $400 million to many causes.
“In the late 1990s, after nearly two decades of painstaking experimentation, Mitchell’s pioneering techniques began to bear fruit. He expanded his fracking operations rapidly and soon attracted the attention of the oil and gas majors. In 2002, he sold his company to Devon Energy Corporation for $3.5 billion dollars.”
He had drilled over 10,000 wells before selling his company to Devon.
Many know of George Mitchell because of his establishment of the Woodlands in north Houston, Tx.
“Mitchell’s genius was to bring to bear advances in technology that allowed the massive drilling equipment used to carve out vertical wells to be turned around, underground, to drill horizontal tunnels. The result was revolutionary. Whereas vertical wells were necessarily limited in the amount of gas they could bring to the surface, once it was possible to have horizontal wells branching in all directions—imagine a Christmas tree—the yields increase exponentially. Rock formations could be fracked and fracked again over huge areas underground, with only a small footprint revealing its presence at the surface.”
Many thanks to George Mitchell for his leadership, his vision and his care for others…he has left truly a great legacy!
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