Mitchell Energy fracced shale with plain water — twice the gas at half the cost

In 1995, 31-year-old Nick Steinsberger was promoted to run Mitchell Energy's Barnett Shale operation in central Texas. A couple of months later, management told him the Barnett was failing: 'It was not an economic venture. And we probably were not going to be doing it much longer.' With a new baby at home, he later recalled, he started wondering what he could trim to save the program.

Each well cost almost $1 million to drill — a couple of miles down into extremely dense rock, then blasted open with an expensive gel made of many chemicals, nearly half the well's cost. Steinsberger began watering down the gel, a little more water and a little less chemical mix every week or two. To his surprise, the thin mix produced just as much gas as the full-strength gel.

So he tried the radical version: no gel at all, just water with a little bleach to kill bacteria and a little soap to help it flow. Everyone believed the shale's clay would swell under that much water and choke off the gas. He convinced Mitchell Energy to let him try. On a chilly June morning near Justin, Texas, he pumped 800,000 gallons of water down the well and watched the pressure gauge climb — the well fracked with water came in almost twice as productive as a gel-fracked well, at roughly half the cost.

The technique was tried on oil wells with the same result, and hydraulic fracturing as we know it was born. Twenty years later, author Gary Sernovitz noted on the same program, it had made the United States 'a player in the global oil market again, which we weren't for a hundred years.'

Cut the gel entirely: frac the dense shale with plain water plus a little bleach and soap, defying warnings that the clay would swell and seal the rock.

Gel was the single biggest cost line in every Barnett well, so it was the obvious place to experiment.

Weekly small tweaks produced evidence the gel's chemistry mattered less than assumed.

Job insecurity made incremental cost-saving a personal mission rather than a corporate directive.

The water test was cheap relative to the program it saved, and management approved a single well trial.

Radical simplification can hide inside a cost-cutting campaign: trim the expensive input weekly, and when nothing changes, keep trimming until you discover it was doing nothing at all.

Slickwater fracturing spread from the Barnett Shale to gas and then oil fields across the country; by the NPR interview in 2016 the United States had become the world's largest oil and natural gas producer, a shift the technique is credited with driving.