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rock,” meaning that it has very low permeability. In the mid-twentieth century, prospectors attempted to liberate petroleum reserves by pulverizing tight rock. Imaginative techniques—using dynamite, machine guns, bazookas, and napalm—were tried, without success. In 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission, working with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the El Paso Natural Gas Company, exploded a twenty-nine-kiloton nuclear bomb, dubbed Gasbuggy, four thousand feet underground, near Farmington, New Mexico. More than thirty other nuclear explosions followed, in what was called Project Plowshare. Natural gas, it turned out, could be extracted from the atomized rubble, but the gas was radioactive.
    A safer and more precise method, developed in the seventies, was to use jets of fluid under intense pressure, to create microcracks in the strata, typically in sandstone or limestone. Expensive gels or foams were typically used to thicken the fluid, and biocide was added to kill the bacteria that can clog the cracks. A granular substance called “proppant,” made of sand or ceramics, was pumped into the cracks, keeping pathways open so that the hydrocarbons could journey to the surface. The process came to be known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. It certainly did jostle loose the captured oil or gas molecules, but as far as Mitchell was concerned, it had a fatal flaw: it was too costly to turn a profit in shale. His quest was to find a way to liberate the gas and save his company—and, perhaps, the world.
    In 1981, Mitchell drilled his first fracked well in the Barnett Shale, the C. W. Slay No. 1. It lost money. Year after year, Mitchell continued drilling in the Barnett; he sank $250 million into this venture, hoping to formulate a cheaper and more effective fracking formula. Seventeen years later, Mitchell’s company was in real trouble. His shareholders had begun to think he was a crank—the company was heavily in debt, and its share price had plunged from thirty dollars to ten. And yet Mitchell kept drilling one unprofitable well after another.
    To cut costs, one of Mitchell’s engineers, Nick Steinsberger, began tinkering with the fracking-fluid formula. He reduced the quantity of gels and chemicals, making the liquid more watery, and added a cheap lubricant, polyacrylamide, which is used in the manufacture of face creams and soft contact lenses. The resulting “slick water”—aided by a dusting of sand for the proppant—worked beautifully. It also cut the cost of fracking by more than two-thirds.
    Mitchell combined this new formula with horizontal drilling techniques that had been developed offshore; once you bored deep enough to reach a deposit, you could steer the bit through the oil- or gas-bearing seam, a far more efficient means of recovery than just going straight down. In 1988, after about three hundred attempts, Mitchell’s company finally made a profit on a fracked well in the Barnett, the S. H. Griffin No. 4. The shale revolution was under way. The same fracking innovations that Mitchell had pioneered in gas were almost immediately applied to oil.
    For the third time in Texas history, the state transformed the energy business in ways that would shake economies and stir political quarrels all over the globe. In July 2008, oil prices had reached an all-time peak, $145.31, but the frackers were just getting started. By 2010, there were more than fourteen thousand wells in the Barnett alone, and the economic formula of past Texas booms held: a sudden fortune, a glut, a crash in prices. By January 2016, oil had fallen to less than $30 a barrel.
    “We’re back where we were in 1931,” Robert Bryce, an author and journalist who writes frequently about the energy business, told me. “Texas drillers are once again determining the price of the marginal barrel in the world market.”
    “Two things are going on,” Mack Fowler, an oilman and philanthropist in Houston, told me, as he laid out several graphs