Fracking Is a Senior Citizen

Today is the 65th birthday of fracking, and the oil industry is getting festive. The American Petroleum Institute, its official lobbying group, has published a little celebratory paean to the art of injecting a chemical cocktail deep into the earth's crust to unlock the gas and oil below.

It begins like this: "Happy birthday, fracking! What a fantastic, 65-year ride it has been – and here’s to another 65 years and more." The API made a nice little Pintrest page for it, too, with the above image in tow.

Environmentalists are already mocking the fawning post:

awww, how cute. Don't ask what's in the cake. RT @jendlouhyhc: API is celebrating 65th birthday of #fracking.

— RL Miller (@RL_Miller) March 17, 2014

But it nonetheless contains an interesting insider's perspective on the history of a technology that, for better or worse, has radically transformed the American energy landscape. Naturally, Halliburton is the key player:

We celebrate the first commercial use of hydraulic fracturing 65 years ago on March 17, 1949, conducted by Halliburton in Stephens County, Okla., and Archer County, Texas. But the roots of the fracking story stretch back to the 1860s. In a 2010 article for the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT), NSI Technologies’ Carl Montgomery and Michael Smith write that energy pioneers experimented with oil well “shooting” that would “rubblize” oil-bearing rock to increase flows. Various methodologies were used to fracture rock formations over the years until Stanolind Oil, a division of Standard Oil of Indiana, conducted the first experimental “hydrafrac” in 1947 in Kansas. It involved pumping fluid carrying “propping agents” at high pressure into a well to create fractures that could be held open to free oil and natural gas in the rock. JPT:

A patent was issued in 1949, with an exclusive license granted to the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company (Howco) to pump the new Hydrafrac process. Howco performed the first two commercial fracturing treatments—one, costing $900, in Stephens County, Oklahoma, and the other, costing $1,000, in Archer County, Texas—on March 17, 1949 … In the first year, 332 wells were treated, with an average production increase of 75%. Applications of the fracturing process grew rapidly and increased the supply of oil in the United States far beyond anything anticipated. Treatments reached more than 3,000 wells a month for stretches during the mid-1950s. 

Now, in 2014, those "propping agents" have been blasted at high pressure into rock formations from New York to California, Texas to North Dakota. The oil boom town is back, methane is flaring into the skies, and coal is going out of business.

Few subjects inspire more controversy than fracking. When burned as fuel, it emits less pollution and carbon dioxide than coal. But studies have shown it can contaminate watersheds, while mounting evidence suggests it can increase earthquake activity, and those emissions savings may be considerably less than its advocates believe, due to excessive methane flaring at wellheads.

Whatever your take on fracking—and bear in mind that most Americans aren't even aware the practice exists at all—the API's article is a reminder that deep drilling and the technologies that enable it are nothing new; it's the freshly widespread adoption of an old practice that the oil industry is really celebrating. Fracking is a complex take on a simple product of the generations-old, Industrial Revolution-powering technology mold: burning carbon for fuel. It's a senior citizen. Environmentalists will argue it's about time fracking was retired.