Blowout

Maddow establishes her central argument that the oil industry, though far-reaching and globally expansive, is primarily an American enterprise. More specifically, Maddow ties the genesis of the American oil industry to John D. Rockefeller, the symbolic godfather of American capitalism. As the creator of the oil giant Standard Oil, Rockefeller witnessed firsthand how the oil industry could create enormous amounts of wealth. At the height of its success, Standard Oil was the largest company on earth, dwarfing its competitors and consolidating American oil as the pioneers of the industry, “having shaped the industry’s prevailing culture: the tools of its trade, its financing, its administration, its ethic, and its reach” (4). However, Standard Oil established a dangerous precedent, as the company was so powerful that neither federal nor state governments could rein the company in. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled that Standard must be broken up into multiple entities, which were still owned by Rockefeller. Profits prevailed for Rockefeller, who experienced no major setbacks from Standard’s pseudo-dissolution. Thus the story of Big Oil and Gas began, and these origins are still evident in the industry’s major players today.

Chapter 2 focuses on the “genie” that revolutionized oil drilling in the last 50 years: slickwatered hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” At the center of the fracking narrative stands George Mitchell, who epitomizes the concept of the “self-made man” and whose persistence led to industrywide breakthroughs. After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) allowed oil companies to detonate nuclear bombs in Rulison, Colorado, to loosen the natural gas in the Rockies, Mitchell turned to fracking. The nuclear bombs successfully loosened the gas in the region, but the gas was mildly radioactive, and so the idea of nuclear fracking was scrapped. Mitchell knew that fracking could work, despite industry trends and countless frustrations in his own efforts. In 1998, however, Mitchell finally got his breakthrough, after modifying the formula for the slickwater being injected into the rock. Mitchell’s new method, combined with the new technology of horizontal drilling, led to a boom in fracking, one that would define the oil industry on a global scale. Mitchell’s methods were a genie for Big Oil and Gas, a magical moneymaker and one of “the most extraordinarily important, disruptive, technologically driven changes in the history of energy” (27).