(p. A9) It’s a complicated yarn that Gary Sernovitz, a novelist and energy investor, spins in “The Green and the Black” and one that is still revealing fresh plot twists. Just last week, the shale boom’s most Shakespearean figure, Aubrey McClendon, died in a car crash the day after he was indicted on charges that he had rigged bids for oil and gas leases in Oklahoma. McClendon was dazzlingly ambitious and persuasive, if perhaps blithe to humdrum legalities.
Other pioneers of America’s new energy age have been equally vivid. George Mitchell of Mitchell Energy was a Greek immigrant who began wildcatting in the 1950s and fracked the Barnett Shale in Texas for nearly two decades before he could make it work financially. By that time he was 77. Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, the 13th child of Oklahoma sharecroppers, became a multi-billionaire by fracking the Bakken formations across Montana and North Dakota. It was men like these, willing to keep buying land and drilling whether they were nearly bankrupt or billionaires, that Mr. Sernovitz credits for the shale revolution.
. . .
He writes: “For those who lament that America no longer makes anything but bond traders, for those who think that ‘maker’ culture only exists in a bearded guy pickling compassionately farmed okra in Austin, spend some time with oil industry engineers to absorb their enthusiasm, empiricism, technical inventiveness, and fearlessness to try and err.”
For the full review, see:
PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON. “BOOKSHELF; The Shale Revolutionaries; There are energy deposits all over the world. Yet drilling oil and gas out of once-inaccessible shale was only pursued vigorously in the U.S.”The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 18, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 17, 2016.)
The book under review, is:
Sernovitz, Gary. The Green and the Black: The Complete Story of the Shale Revolution, the Fight over Fracking, and the Future of Energy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.