The Boom Read Free

failed. It was the first of more than one hundred Oklahoma bank failures. Bankruptcy auctioneers replaced those Caddys as the city’s unofficial symbol.
    It must have been quite an education, unlike any that McClendon had received at Duke. He witnessed the boom-and-bust nature of oil and gas. He saw the riches available if you could time the rise and fall of volatile commodities correctly, and he also saw how money made all this possible. In time, he would go on to found Chesapeake Energy and become a convert to the potential of shale gas. He would do more than anyone else to promote shale gas. He was part pied piper, part early adopter, and part rapacious capitalist. Those dense rocks that resemble an old-fashioned chalkboard would make him a billionaire, before he nearly lost it all. McClendon would use his energy wealth to advance his energy and political agenda, assemble a world-class wine collection, and uproot the Seattle SuperSonics of the National Basketball Association, bringing his hometown its first professional sports franchise, renamed the Oklahoma City Thunder. More than anyone else, he would usher in an era of energy abundance.
    History is full of odd ironies. The birth of shale gas is no exception. An environmentally minded oilman, George Mitchell, pioneered a way of cracking open rocks with water and chemicals that would come to embody one of the greatest environmental fears of the twenty-first century. And a right-wing oilman, Aubrey McClendon, would become an outspoken prophet for an abundant, low-carbon source of energy.

    Not long after Chesapeake inquired about leasing the Farm, my father spent a day driving around to visit neighbors and discovered that many had signed leases already. The reality sunk in. Future drilling locations surrounded the Farm. “We believed they would go under our property and get the gas anyway,” he told me later. It is an old fear. At the beginning of his classic novel
Oil!
, Upton Sinclair captured how the industry played on this worry. “Take it from me as an oilman,” the budding tycoon J. Arnold Ross tells a group of neighbors. “There ain’t a-goin’ to be many gushers here at Prospect Hill; the pressure under the ground will soon let up, and it’ll be them that get their wells down first that’ll get the oil.” This race to drill and drain free-flowing reservoirs was how it worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is no longer the case. Still, the fear remains.
    My mother called me again. “It is going to happen, and it is going to be obtrusive,” I said. But it wasn’t necessarily all bad, I added. Gas was a low-carbon energy source. By signing the lease, she was contributing to its growth. Until you sign the lease, you have the upper hand, I told her. They want your land. Craft an agreement that gives you a say over where the wells will be drilled to keep them on the periphery of the property, out of sight. It was possible for the industry to coexist with the land. In 2004 I visited Ted Turner’s ranch in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It is a spread so beautiful, it was once considered as a possible national park. Turner allowed gas drilling but wrote a lease that contained stipulations to make sure there was minimal impact. The energy company could bring only so many trucks onto his property at any one time. The wells were camouflaged behind low walls. The company tried four different shades of paint before Turner’s ranch manager settled on one that blended with the ponderosa pines. I suggested that my parents take a similar approach.
    The Farm’s owners met in March 2009. “There was the inevitability of change,” my father recalled. “It was coming. All of our neighbors, all of the land around us, had signed. We were really concerned we would get all the negative—the trucks, the noise—and none of the positive stuff: the money.”
    My parents and their friends signed the twenty-page lease in October 2009. In