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  Rockefeller’s company, meanwhile, just kept eating would-be competitors. About 90 percent of America’s crude flowed through Standard Oil by the end of the 1890s. The company had money and means to produce its own crude, and refine it, and get it shipped to market on its own (always favorable) terms. Standard was capable of controlling the price of oil and railroad freight rates and had cash in the bank to pay off the state and federal legislators who wrote laws governing the industry. “John D. and his colleagues regarded government regulators as nuisances to be bypassed wherever possible,” says Rockefeller’s estimable biographer, Ron Chernow. “He felt that politicians were basically parasites who would shake down businessmen. I mean, all of this bribery he saw as extortion; that is, the politicians shaking him down, rather than his paying off the politicians….I think he regarded these payments really as a business expense.”

  Standard Oil eventually grew into “the largest business empire on earth,” according to Chernow. “I don’t know that the business world has ever seen an agglomeration of wealth and power on the scale of Standard Oil.” This was the era of consolidation, of the Big Trust, which was nineteenth-century parlance for monopoly—the Sugar Trust, the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, the Tobacco Trust, the Rope-and-Twine Trust. But the Rockefeller-controlled Oil Trust was the first, the biggest, the most powerful, and easily the most talked-about trust in the country. Rockefeller himself stood with Andrew Carnegie (steel), Philip Armour (meat products), and James Buchanan Duke (cigarettes) as the richest and most powerful commodity producers on the continent. They sat on mounds of private wealth unimaginable in the young republic at the time of Rockefeller’s own birth. John D. died nearly fifty years before the debut of the Forbes 400, the annual listing of the wealthiest private individuals in the country. But when the editors of a book timed to coincide with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of that list made some calculations, they declared Rockefeller the richest single individual in the history of America. They figured his peak net worth at $305 billion (in 2006 dollars), which means that if John D. were to be magically reanimated today, with his peak fortune still intact, his personal wealth would roughly triple that of the whippersnapper who sat atop the Forbes list in 2019.

  Millions of barrels of ink have been expended in trying to explain the reasons for Rockefeller’s spectacular achievement, to reveal the cardinal (and perhaps replicable) tactic, to pinpoint the specific innate genius that made it all happen. Theories abound. Take, for instance, what could be called the Bung Theory. A bung is the stopper once used to seal up a barrel of oil, and Rockefeller’s intense interest in this unromantic industrial cog, his keen watch on the monthly bung count, offers a tantalizing lead on the secret to his success. “Your March inventory showed 10,750 bungs on hand,” Rockefeller once wrote to one of his foremen. “The report for April shows 20,000 new bungs bought, 24,000 bungs used, and 6,000 bungs on hand. What became of the other 750 bungs?” Maybe the key was pinching every penny! John D. Rockefeller wasted nothing, see, so he could push his costs down, undercut all competitors on price, and drive them out of the business, or at least into Standard Oil’s angel of mercy ark.

  Then there is the well-traveled Great Monster Theory. “Run, children, or Rockefeller’ll get you,” was a threat that could strike terror in the Pennsylvania oil patch in the late nineteenth century. The Great Monster Theory gained much currency in the popular mind after Ida Tarbell’s remarkable series of investigative articles published in McClure’s Magazine beginning in 1902, “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” Tarbell, who grew up in the patch, itemized the more than thirty years of Rockefeller’s underhanded, corrupt, predatory behavior that constituted his effort to wipe the field of competitors. He was, in Tarbell’s rendering, a rapacious and devious villain. Widows and orphans, beware. It didn’t hurt that Rockefeller, aged sixty-three at the time of publication, looked ready to inhabit the villain role by then. He was already growing thin and pinched—and worse. “He suffered from something called alopecia. In 1901, he lost not only all the hair on his head; he lost all body hair,” Chernow explains. “Ida Tarbell came along a year later, did this series portraying him as a monster. And since he was hairless and suddenly looked old—and ghoulish—his appearance seemed to ratify what she was saying in the series, so that the timing was particularly unfortunate for Rockefeller.”

  There is also the Man of His Times Theory. Rockefeller, this theory posits, was simply playing by the very loose set of rules of his day, just like everybody else was. The boundaries of capitalism and democracy in America were still being chalked, the rules of the game still being written. The prevailing ethic was best summed up by one of Rockefeller’s early partners, Henry M. Flagler, who kept a copy of this little ditty on his desk: “Do unto others as they would do unto you—and do it first.” The point of the free market was not to compete but to win. “The most serious charge that can be laid at [Standard’s] door is that it has succeeded,” wrote an oilman who felt compelled to sell out to Rockefeller in the 1880s or suffer the consequences. “It has outwitted its competitors who sought to play the same game but had not so thoroughly mastered the art….In the business battle, the extremity of one is the opportunity of the other….It is the rule of our competitive life that the time when the business rival is on the downward road—when creditors are pressing him hard, when banks are clamoring that he shall meet his paper, when the sheriff is threatening to close his doors—this is the opportunity for the other rival to strike the finishing blow and make merchandise out of the misery of his fellow-man.” Rockefeller’s eldest son and heir offered an exceedingly aromatic metaphor to justify this need to (occasionally, of course) rely on cutthroat tactics. “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it,” John D. junior sermonized. “This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.”

  Rockefeller himself had a number of pet theories about his spectacular rise. A devout and puritanical Baptist, John D. was certain there was a higher being at work. “I believe the power to make money is a gift from God,” he explained to one writer, “just as are the instincts for art, music, literature, the doctor’s talent, the nurse’s, yours—to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”

  These various theories, and the many others in circulation, are not mutually exclusive. The whole truth of John D. Rockefeller is complicated and involves pieces of them all. But the rock-bottom fact on which everything else rests is actually quite simple: Standard Oil just kept turning out the finest product on the market, at the lowest price to the consumer. Ka-ching!

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  By the first decade of the twentieth century, Standard Oil was so powerful it was pretty much writing its own rules; neither the federal government nor the various state governments were capable of reining it in. Rockefeller and his corporation were, demonstrably, beyond governance—a situation that raised alarms in a democratic republic purportedly constituted of free men, dedicated to the idea of equality. To some, it seemed, well, un-American that this extraordinary bounty of natural resources—in all its “splendor and fragrance”—should be fenced off in someone’s private preserve. In 1911, about forty years after Rockefeller embarked on his quest to dominate the oil business and about twenty years after he got there, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was running a conspiracy in restraint of trade that had attempted to monopolize the interstate oil industry. And had largely succeeded. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Edward D. White wrote that it was clearly Standard’s “intent and purpose to maintain the dominancy over the oil industry, not as a result
of normal methods of industrial development, but by new means of combination which were resorted to in order that greater power might be added than would otherwise have arisen had normal methods been followed.”

  As a remedy, the Court ordered Standard to split itself into about three dozen distinct firms that would be forced to compete with one another. Rockefeller, who retained ownership in all the spin-offs, found this arrangement surprisingly salubrious. The separate companies all flourished. John D. wound up a richer man after the breakup than he was before. And even today, more than a hundred years later, the major non-state-run international oil companies we know best—ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Marathon—have their roots in Standard Oil and trace their ancestry directly back to Rockefeller. Standard DNA is shot through the oil industry, as are Standard’s dominant traits: a penchant for pinching pennies, an eagerness to devour and expand, a mistrust and even hatred of government regulation, a vaguely delusional sense of higher calling, and a wary respect for innovation. Worth keeping these traits in mind, because they’ve gone on to shape the modern world. They still function as a character sketch—or maybe a psychological profile—of the richest, most powerful, and most destructive industry on the globe.

  In the century or so since the Court-mandated breakup of Standard Oil, technological innovation has been the main agent of renewal in the industry and has created entirely new fortunes. Take, for example, the Koch family, famous for funding right-wing causes and politicians across the country. Koch Industries today is the second-largest privately held corporation in the United States, encompassing everything from commodities trading to cattle to paper pulp, but the corporation owes its honest-money beginnings to invention, to petroleum engineer Fred Koch’s discovering a better and cheaper method for making gasoline from crude oil, back in the 1920s.

  And consider the story of the field engineer in Texas who perfected a toothy rotary drill bit that dramatically improved the ability to drive through underground rock. He made himself a star in the oil patch. The Sharp-Hughes bit (advertised as “A Friend to the Driller”) ultimately made that engineer’s son, Howard Hughes Jr., the richest man in the world for a time.

  And consider the story of Robert S. Kerr, who built Kerr-McGee and made his own fortune by proving that you could stick a drilling rig out in the water, beyond sight of land, and suck oil up through the seabed. “Spectacular Gulf of Mexico Discovery” screamed a headline in Oil & Gas Journal in 1947, when Robert S. Kerr made good. “Possible 100-Million Barrel Field—10 Miles at Sea.”

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  Most of us laymen have only a vague understanding of the science of oil and natural gas. Our fuels of choice started as living organisms hundreds of millions of years ago (Sinclair’s Dino logo notwithstanding, oil is not from dinosaurs). And then over time—a lot of time—all that eons-old organic matter got covered up, deep in the earth’s geologic layers, packed into an intensely hot and pressurized cauldron, where it was all boiled down, remarkably, into the stew we modern creatures use to power our daily existence. Fossil fuels! The popular vision is of a vast worldwide web of subterranean lakes and caverns filled with oil and gas. Enterprising people figure out exactly where a big pocket is, stick giant industrial straws into the ground, suck it dry, and then move on to the next one. And the world is lit. Voilà.

  But the truth is, there aren’t really giant underground lakes or even puddles filled with Jurassic Juice. Most of the hydrocarbons we want are spread through layer upon layer of what looks like nearly impermeable underground rock—in very tight little micro-crevices. The capture of fossil fuels is less like sticking a straw into a Big Gulp schooner and gently drawing it out, and more like sticking that straw into a sponge and having at it. Try them both some time. It’s not too tough to drain the Big Gulp, is it? The extraction from the sponge requires considerably more, well, brutish effort. Things could tend toward violent. And this understanding of the need for near-violent force has driven most of the successful (a.k.a. lucrative) innovations in the oil industry. Big technological advances are not made by PhDs in white lab coats. Innovation in the oil and gas industry is rarely about quantum mechanics or higher math. Innovation in oil and gas is about brawn. So it stands to reason that the shale gas revolution of the early twenty-first century was made possible by a pair of innovations that relied largely on pure brute force. And, as you might expect, that amount of industrial-scale pushing and shoving can produce some magnificent collateral damage along the way.

  It was August 1969, less than three weeks after Neil Armstrong put the first footprint on the moon. Americans were just getting used to thinking of the world as our oyster; now maybe the sky and the stars were included too. And with Project Rulison in Garfield County, Colorado, the public affairs office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission signaled the start of yet another bold new adventure—another U.S. taxpayer–backed world first. The press release detailed the itinerary, from the D-day Minus Two instructions for the registration of official visitors at the Ramada Inn in nearby Grand Junction, to the final luncheon, where “a preliminary post-detonation briefing is planned.” The thirty-six families who lived within a five-mile radius of the blast site had already been advised to evacuate temporarily; they’d be allowed back in after, as soon as everyone was sure it was all safe. The state game commission had cautioned hunters and fishermen “not to venture” into the area. The AEC had determined an optimal detonation time after consulting with local officials as to the normal daily traffic patterns on the nearby railroad tracks and nearby I-70 and as to the local school bus schedule. Sure, there would be hassles and headaches, and perhaps even a little property damage in the immediate (and maybe even not so immediate) surroundings. But if this industrial experiment proved out, it would be another problem solved—another big-thinking American triumph—thanks to the magic of science.

  The problem that Project Rulison was designed to solve was especially frustrating to Austral Oil Company, owner of the rights to the natural gas deep in the Mesaverde formation in Colorado’s Rulison Field—natural gas it had been unable to get out of the ground. Austral knew there was plenty of gas at that site, but it was all locked up in an impermeable shale formation, and in 1969 nobody had found a workable method of sufficiently fracturing all that tight rock to loose the bounty within. Austral was sure it was sitting on about 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Rulison Field and that there was another 100 trillion cubic feet in the surrounding basin. The U.S. Bureau of Mines estimated that the Rocky Mountains held a total of 317 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to fuel the entire country for twenty years! And much of it was on government-owned land. Royalty payments might swell the U.S. Treasury by as much as $4 billion, Project Rulison’s cheerleaders noted, if somebody would only figure a way to get at all that gas. And time seemed to be of the essence. The world population was growing every year, and so was its energy consumption, especially here at home. The United States accounted for 6 percent of the earth’s population in 1969 but consumed 35 percent of the total global energy output. “[Natural] gas, which is the cleanest of all fuels, is in short supply and growing more critical,” explained an Austral executive. “Something must be done to make more gas available to the constantly increasing market.”

  Happily, Austral had a willing partner in this enterprise: the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Austral agreed to pony up about nine-tenths of the $6.5 million cost of the “exploration” project, and the AEC provided the sorts of things a private oil company in Houston could not, like uranium and plutonium and detonation fuses and special devices for measuring radioactive fallout. The Project Rulison guys were so sure this new fracking adventure would work they were already promoting it as America’s next big technological leap even before they tried it: “Since our society is constantly clamoring for more non-polluting energy, we advocate vigorous efforts to bring the new technology of nuclear stimulation to rapid commercialization.” You
read that right. Nuclear. Stimulation. Why go straight to the old derricks and drill bits when you have the option to start with an atomic bomb, to loosen everything up? Faster, tidier.

  Late in that summer of 1969, the separate components of an atomic bomb were driven by “specially equipped government vans” to surface ground zero, a.k.a. the Austral wellhead in Rulison, about five miles off I-70. SGZ was already fenced off and under armed guard, courtesy of the private contractor Wackenhut Services Inc. But the project manager, in his wisdom, instituted an extra layer of security. “Final assembly of the explosive was accomplished under ‘Buddy System’ controls in the Wellhead Building in the fenced exclusion area,” he detailed in his final report. “The ‘Buddy System,’ or two-man concept, was utilized for protection of the nuclear explosive upon arrival and until detonation.” Sure, one guy might screw up or go nutty when faced with the responsibilities of handling a nuclear bomb, but that’s what his buddy was there for. So, two guys, not one: that was the safety plan. Once the bomb was assembled, Austral became, for a brief interval, proud owner of a 1,250-pound, 43-kiloton nuclear weapon. A weapon nearly three times the power of the bomb that incinerated the interior of Hiroshima and killed nearly half of its 300,000 residents.

  Important as it was to Austral and the rest of the oil and gas industry, the success of Project Rulison was perhaps just as important to the AEC and its Atoms for Peace initiative. Not long after the United States exploded its second nuclear bomb over another densely populated Japanese city in August 1945, putting a final destructive exclamation point on the World War II civilian death count, the AEC had launched its effort to keep the scientific momentum going, but hopefully in a less deadly direction. A number of the young physicists and chemists who had helped develop the weapons dropped on Japan felt some ethical pangs, even as they were assured the moral scorecard was all in their favor. Dropping the atomic bombs had saved millions of other lives that would have been lost had the war been prolonged, American politicians insisted. But the casualties in Japan continued to pile up in the weeks and months after the war as thousands more died from the effects of radiation poisoning. The general in charge of the U.S. nuclear weapons project sought to ease the national conscience, telling senators in November 1945 that victims of radiation exposure die “rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.” More than a dozen years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the body count was still climbing. Long-term studies had confirmed that people exposed to high doses of radiation were dying from cancer at extraordinary rates. Survivors who had been nearest the blast zone were thirty times more likely to develop leukemia, according to a study done in the late 1950s.