CRACKUP IN WEST TEXAS

IF PRICES DON’T RECOVER BOTH DRAMATICALLY AND QUICKLY, THE ERA OF SHALE OIL MIGHT COME TO A SHUDDERING END

- Bryan Gruley, Kevin Crowley, Rachel Adams-Heard, and David Wethe

TWENTY years ago, before the U.S. oil industry became a global energy power that strikes fear into Saudi Arabia, brothers Dan and Farris Wilks started Frac Tech Services LLC in tiny Cisco, Texas. The company provided equipment for hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, the breaking up of tight sedimentary rock by blasting water, sand, and assorted chemicals through horizontal bores at fantastically high pressure.

Frac Tech grew into one of the most successful pressure pumpers as the U.S. experienced a boom first in shale gas, then in shale oil. The Wilks brothers became billionaires when they sold Frac Tech in 2011, just as shale oil was transforming the U.S. into one of the world’s biggest producers of crude. Last September the country became a net exporter of crude and petroleum products for the first full month in at least 70 years.

The big oil explorers and producers are household names: Chevron and BP, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. But the U.S. oil renaissance has ridden heavily on the backs of little-known pressure pumpers that figured out how to extract oil from the stubborn shale of Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. The companies that perform this grimy work are also central to the potent political notion that Americans shouldn’t have to rely on the Saudis, Russians, and other oil producers for petroleum.