Engineer who developed fracking, the revolutionary and controversial technique for extracting oil and gas
George Mitchell, who has died aged 94, was one of the elite corps of engineers whose ideas, ingenuity and persistence changed the world. He was the father of "fracking" – hydraulic fracturing, the process by which dense shale rocks deep underground are blasted apart to release the gas and oil trapped within – and his innovations, developed over several decades, started an engineering revolution that is transforming the US from a guzzler of imported fuel to an energy-independent nation. Mitchell's influence, and his innovations in getting hard-to-reach fossil fuels out of the ground, have arguably had more effect on US foreign policy than any statesman since the start of the cold war.
The extent of the revolution he brought about is hard to overstate. In the 1990s, the US was so dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia that the future of relations between the world's most powerful nation and the Middle East seemed set. Mitchell opened up a new and previously unthought-of resource – shale gas. Thanks to the hydraulic fracturing techniques that he pioneered, for the first time since the second world war the US could be free of the need to import fuels. The International Energy Agency has predicted that within five years America could be the biggest oil producer in the world.
Born in Galveston, Texas, Mitchell was the son of poor Greek immigrants. His charitable foundation, which has given more than $400m to various causes, programmes and institutions, called his story "quintessentially American". With virtually nothing to his name, he graduated first in his class from Texas A&M University, then joined the "Greatest Generation" of American men fighting in the second world war, as an engineer. Afterwards, he and his wife, Cynthia – whom he married in 1943 – settled in Texas, where he saw at first-hand the bonanza of the early discoveries of oil.
Mitchell became what we could call an entrepreneur and what at the time was termed a "wildcatter". He bought, at great financial risk, areas of Texas that were unregarded by the oil majors. From these he made his first fortune. But it was not until Mitchell brought his engineering expertise to bear on a hitherto neglected problem that he achieved the breakthrough that made his name.
Fracking as a technique was nothing new: the theory had been explored and even demonstrated, if little practised, since the 1940s. The process involved – and still does – blasting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure against dense shale rocks, creating tiny fissures that release the microscopic bubbles of gas trapped within. But the technique was difficult to use in practice, and any gas produced was hard to capture, because of its tendency to leak away rather than be funnelled to the surface in pipes. The work required to drill a single well was not repaid by the fuel yielded.
Mitchell's genius was to bring to bear advances in technology that allowed the massive drilling equipment used to carve out vertical wells to be turned around, underground, to drill horizontal tunnels. The result was revolutionary. Whereas vertical wells were necessarily limited in the amount of gas they could bring to the surface, once it was possible to have horizontal wells branching in all directions – imagine a Christmas tree – the yields increased exponentially. Rock formations could be fracked and fracked again over huge areas underground, with only a small "footprint" revealing its presence at the surface.
In the late 1990s, after nearly two decades of painstaking experimentation, Mitchell's pioneering techniques began to bear fruit. He expanded his fracking operations rapidly and soon attracted the attention of the oil and gas "majors". In 2002, he sold his company to Devon Energy Corporation for $3.5bn.
It was long after Mitchell started using horizontal fracking that the problems began to emerge. The first wells were in unpopulated regions, but as the technique was more widely used, people living near fracking sites found their air and water contaminated, and thanks to a clause inserted into US law in 2005 by the then vice-president, Dick Cheney, who has extensive fossil fuel interests, they were unable to find out which chemicals were being pumped into the land below them. Fracking became a focus for protest.
Mitchell had drilled more than 10,000 wells before selling to Devon. Today there are more than half a million in the US – the flaring of excess gas can be seen from space at night, lighting up the continent like Oxford Street at Christmas.
When Mitchell started his work, the theory of climate change was a quaint backwater of academic research. Within his lifetime, our unquenchable thirst for hydrocarbons has led to fears of a climate catastrophe, as the vast volumes of carbon spewed into the atmosphere are already having effects. Scientists warn we must leave much of the world's fossil fuel resources in the ground if we are to prevent runaway global warming. But as Mitchell found, leaving stuff in the ground does not come naturally to us. The most profitable direction of innovation has always been to squeeze more out of our mineral wealth.
Mitchell himself was a lover of nature, and an ardent philanthropist. His Woodlands estate in Texas was intended as a model village, and he poured a large part of his fortune into conservation, including attempts to save the Texas woodpecker.
Cynthia died in 2009. Mitchell is survived by their 10 children.
• George Phydias Mitchell, engineer and businessman, born 21 May 1919; died 26 July 2013
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