The End of Country (20 page)

He had studied it as an undergraduate at Penn State and mastered the theories of its development as a graduate student at Yale and Texas A&M, and throughout his career, he had returned to it again and again.

The pursuit of a deeper understanding of the forces within the Marcellus led him over the years from one place to the next, from Texas to the prestigious Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, where he found himself working on a state government–sponsored program to figure out why somebody would have been dumb enough to build the Indian Point nuclear reactor directly astride the potentially
earthquake-prone Ramapo fault in southern New York. While there, he found time to pal around with a young researcher named Walter Alvarez, who, along with his father, Luis Alvarez, would later become famous for developing a theory about how a giant meteor had crashed into the earth millions of years ago with such force that it sent up a cloud of dust big enough to block out the sun around the world and cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. Walter Alvarez and Terry Engelder became friendly enough that Engelder had, in his spare time, even joined the younger Alvarez on a few expeditions to Italy to collect iridium-rich soil samples from deeply buried layers of earth—samples that would bolster Alvarez’s theory that the fallout from the massive meteor strike had coated the earth at the precise geological moment that his theoretical cataclysm occurred. Engelder’s experience with both the Indian Point problem and Alvarez’s quest to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs underscored for Engelder just how vulnerable the world is to random events. And when, in 1980, Alvarez made his great contribution to the understanding of earth’s violent history, that milestone would motivate the competitive Engelder to plunge even more deeply into his own area of expertise, the study of the energy in the rocks themselves.

Over the next several decades, Engelder became one of the nation’s leading experts on the mechanics of fractures and faults, on how the pressures and stresses within the earth are constantly at work carving energy channels deep beneath the surface. He was much in demand, not just in the United States but around the world. From Saudi Arabia to Australia, governments and energy companies sought out his expertise, begging him to explain the mysterious fractures in the earth that, if harnessed properly, could channel great petroleum riches their way, and if mishandled, could just as easily make those riches vanish into some subterranean channel.

He traveled extensively for these lectures, always especially interested in joining consortia and panels that were held in Paris because it gave him a chance to spend some of his spare time at the Louvre, in a gallery that had provided him with an epiphany: the realization that the fissures in the earth mirrored almost precisely the cracks that spread across the paint on the face of the Mona Lisa. In choosing to paint his masterpiece on a particular panel of wood, Leonardo da Vinci, the scientist and artist who had foreseen so many of the great
discoveries of the modern world, had inadvertently created a near perfect replica of the conflicting forces that control the inner workings of the earth itself. The lateral stresses and internal pressures at work on the wood beneath the inscrutable smile were identical to those stresses and pressures that had created fractures in the Marcellus Shale that could be seen on the surface near Engelder’s childhood home. It was the kind of thing that only a geologist—in fact, only this geologist—could see. Beneath the most famous and inscrutable painting in the world, there was yet another beautiful mystery, a diagram of the ongoing act of creation, as prescient and precise in its way as Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian Man had been.

It was in 1976, after deciding to take a break from the Indian Point project, that Engelder had what would become his most important insight into the development of the Marcellus. He had driven home to Allegany County, New York, to spend some time with his parents and his brother, Richard, at the family’s forty-five-acre homestead. He and Richard were sitting on a rock outcropping along a creek when he noticed something about the local fossils that had never caught his eye before. Crinoids, the tiny fossilized remains of some of the first victims of the awesome tectonic upheavals that had created the Appalachian Ridge and the valley below it, are a common find in the northeastern United States, so common that almost every child in the region sooner or later runs out of space for them in his rock collection. Typically, they are perfectly round like the head of a screw. But there was something odd about the fossils Engelder spotted embedded in the exposed rock that day. He noticed that these specimens were not round but elliptical. It was as if someone had stuck them in a wad of Silly Putty and then pulled it laterally. What’s more, the elliptical crinoids all appeared to have been stretched and pulled in the same direction. The fact that all these fossils were deformed the same way and aligned in the same direction intrigued Engelder. “What do you think the odds are of that?” Engelder asked his brother, a statistician.

To Engelder, the find suggested that a powerful external force had worked on those rocks, and over the next several months, he bounced across the region from Wellsville to Corning, from Olean to Ithaca, trying to determine whether whatever had happened at his family farm had happened elsewhere. It had. In fact, in every single layer of
shale that he explored across the southern tier of New York and into northern Pennsylvania, he found the same elliptical shapes in precisely the same alignment. The forces that could deform the rocks and the crinoids could certainly have the same impact beneath the ground.

There was little practical use for Engelder’s discovery at the time. Although some enterprising petroleum geologists understood that a better model of how underground fractures actually work might someday come in handy in trying to coax hydrocarbons out of rock formations, for the most part Engelder’s work was ignored. Up to that point, no one had thoroughly understood the massive tectonic forces that had shaped the Appalachians—the theory of plate tectonics was then still in its infancy—and Engelder’s accidental discovery of a couple of dozen squashed fossils (untold thousands more uncovered later would prove him right) was in its way a truly significant find. It wasn’t the kind of thing that made headlines—not the way Walter Alvarez’s theory had—but it was important nonetheless. For the next thirty-one years, Engelder and his students labored in obscurity to map the anticlines and synclines, the hills and valleys, plateaus and troughs across the Appalachians and to pinpoint as best they could the complex fractures and joints that spread out like a three-dimensional spider’s web deep beneath the ground, cracks that were driven by the gas within those rocks.

Because of his long and detailed study of the subject, Engelder had been among the first academics to begin following the events in the Marcellus, but by the fall of 2007, he was no longer alone. That’s when he happened to be reading a copy of
Explorer
, the magazine of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, that included an interview with Range Resources’ vice president, Jeffrey Ventura, the same man who had told the hapless Bill Zagorski to “put the big frack” on the very first Marcellus well two years earlier. Describing the Marcellus, Ventura made the offhand claim that the northern reaches of the shale, from the West Virginia border to the New York state line, the very place that Engelder had been studying for three decades, were not sufficiently fractured and so were unlikely to yield appreciable quantities of gas even with the most cutting-edge technology. “You have a lot of gas in place,” Ventura said, “but you don’t have that natural fracturing.”

Ventura would later insist that he never meant to say that there were no fractures in the rocks, that what he really meant was that the fractures in the northern part of the play were different from the fractures in the southern region and that a different technique was needed to maximize their potential. Whatever he meant, to Engelder it was a frontal assault on everything he held sacred.

And so Engelder began to draft a response, building on his years and years of data collected in the shadows of obscurity. Using calculations of earth stress, borings taken from various deep shales over the years, and a lot of old records collected from everybody from wildcatting gasmen in the early part of the last century to the various studies conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, Engelder and his students had developed a comprehensive map of the major fractures in the Marcellus.

Now, all he needed to do was compile the data from all the available sources on production rates to bolster his argument. Those, he assumed, would prove that the gas shows in the Marcellus were strongest in those places where the Marcellus naturally fractured along a southwest-to-northeast axis—the direction in which those old crinoids on his family farm had been aligned.

Engelder had been right about the locations of the best producing wells, but he was flummoxed by the amount of gas that they were actually producing. If those numbers were right, those 50 trillion cubic feet of gas buried in the Marcellus were roughly ten times more than any previous estimate had allowed. That would be the equivalent of the BTUs produced by more than 8 billion barrels of oil. In a country that burned through 6.6 billion barrels of oil each year, and that had spread itself pretty thin trying to find ways to keep that oil flowing, this was a staggering development.

Engelder knew that before going public, he had to be sure he was right. So he called a buddy of his, professor Gary Lash, a fellow frack geek up at the State University of New York in Fredonia, a rock-solid and unemotional scientist whom Engelder respected and trusted. He nervously asked Lash to double-check his math. Lash phoned back almost immediately. Yup, Lash replied, Engelder’s math was right. This was a big one, a monster.

Engelder realized he couldn’t simply send this conclusion off in a letter to an industry journal without first warning his employer. Just
before Christmas, Engelder dutifully notified the dean of the College of Earth and Minerals Sciences about his findings, and the dean in turn alerted the president of the university. If his decades in academia had taught Engelder anything, it was that geology and college bureaucracies have one thing in common: they both take a hell of a long time to get anything done. So he was a bit surprised when, immediately after the Christmas break, he was ordered to sit down with a public relations official from the university. It was, by the standards of academia, breakneck speed. “I’ve got a story that’s gonna knock your socks off,” he told her. She was skeptical at first, but she became more excited as Engelder laid it all out.

The next day, the university issued a press release. The story was picked up by the
Centre Daily Times
, the local newspaper, and from there the wires picked it up and it was carried all over the world. By the beginning of February, almost every major news outlet in the United States had run some kind of story about the staggering promise of the Marcellus Shale.

Virtually every story featured Engelder and detailed how his numbers, along with calculations added by Lash, had triggered what amounted to a land rush. All of a sudden, the soft-spoken academic was a celebrity of sorts. His office phone rang at all hours, and scores of people sought a few minutes of his time, and it wasn’t just journalists. Big names from the oil and gas industry began to seek him out, and so did the heads of various hedge funds. It was intoxicating. He had achieved the kind of media attention that even Alvarez had never enjoyed. Whenever people talked about the good that might come of the Marcellus Shale, Engelder’s name invariably came up. But of course, there was a flip side: if the Marcellus failed to live up to Engelder’s predictions, that, too, would be laid at his feet. At one point, a friendly fellow academic, a dean at the university, pulled him aside and warned him that a lot of people would soon be making big decisions, life-altering financial decisions, as a result of Engelder’s public statements. Engelder’s sudden prominence might make him a target for opportunistic lawsuits in the event that his predictions turned out to be wrong. The dean suggested that he, and maybe Lash, should form a company that would at least shield their modest houses, should they find themselves on the wrong side of a civil action. A few days later, Engelder and Lash did just that.

It’s not that Engelder had thrown caution to the wind. He had told anyone who would listen that it was still very early in the play, and no one yet knew whether those early, promising numbers from Range and the other pioneers in the Marcellus would hold up. But those whispered warnings were quickly obscured by the vision of truckloads of cash that would soon be arriving on the back roads of Pennsylvania, and by the promise that America’s energy future might soon no longer be tied to the most politically unstable regions of the world.

At that moment, there was perhaps no one in the country who had as firm a grasp as Engelder did on the vast sweep of random events that had created the Marcellus Shale, the false starts and coincidences that had followed its discovery and led now to the first halting steps toward its development, and that in turn would change the fortunes not only of the folks back in Allegany County, New York, but throughout the Appalachian Basin from Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, to Marshall County, West Virginia, and maybe even the whole nation. There were risks, and they were formidable. But there was promise, too. In a letter written home, Engelder laid all that out to his friends and his family. He was serene. He signed the letter, sealed the envelope, and stuck it in his pocket, the last words of it still echoing in his head:

“Merry Christmas, America.”