All that failed. Later I saw him say in response to a question that his plan failed because he didn't anticipate the importance of fracking.
I've never understood how a successful oilman with his experience and inside view could have been so mistaken.
well.....it might be as simple as this
he grew up in the TX Panhandle
Anyone who grew up there has wind embedded in their DNA. You are left thinking, can’t we do something good with this?
it is a bit seductive b/c the wind out there is truly surreal
I’m not a big fan of “wind energy”. But I can sure see how it appeals to some. Also, Boone thought it would be the thing that made us energy independent (back to not anticipating fracking.....)
Apparently the enviro whack-jobs convinced him that oil was on the way out and ‘renewable’ energy was the future.
He bought into their claptrap...................
Easy. It was taken as a given that you could never link up enough of the pore spaces in shale to get the oil and gas to flow out of it. Tunnel vision is another factor. Pickens was also given to playing angles and wind power was a tax encouraged angle he could not resist. His other angle was trying to tie up all the water rights he could find in the Texas Panhandle. On his ranch he has just about drained the Ogalla Aquifer to create game plot oasis in that waste land of Canadian River breaks. Boone gave away a lot of money but Boone took good care of himself. Fine though, it was his money to do with as he saw fit.
When I first learned to read logs I looked at the porosity curve of the Wolfcamp shale an marveled. The porosity, the percentage of pore space in the rock was at least three times that of the reservoir rock we were looking for. I innocently asked why we could not produce such a huge volume of pore space with no apparent salt water. The answer, “Look at the Gamma Ray, that’s shale. Everybody knows you can’t produce shale boy.” And so, with that I too became one of those taken by conventional wisdom.
Others had tried mind you but it was early in the days of Nitro. That did not work. The Devonian Shale in Appalachia made companies like Dominion Resources but nobody ever asked, until George Mitchell in the Fort Worthless Basin, what made that different?
It turns out though that the shale really isn’t just shale but shale and a bunch of cracks and crappy rock with some permeability that are linked up by hydraulic fracturing. If it were just shale alone the decline curve would produce uneconomic wells in just a few months.
It has always amazes me how compartmentalized knowledge is. How something commonly done in one place remains unrecognized for the opportunities it offers with just a little tweaking or adaptation in another place.
Physics is physics and people are people. There is nothing new under the sun. Only things that have been done and forgotten, tried and failed for the wrong reasons or for which connections and recombination of the principles have not been discovered yet.