Bigger than Steve Jobs: He was the ‘Spirit of America’

A titan of American industry died in 2013 and he was bigger by far than Steve Jobs.

This giant created an entire city from scratch. He gave away $400 million in charities. He made America as energy independent as it is possible. He transformed the energy dynamics of the entire world, and increased the quantity of energy that can be extracted in oil and natural gas within the United States by extraordinary amounts. Not one American in 10,000 knows his name.

His name was George Phydias Mitchell.

As The New York Times acknowledged in its obituary of him, “Fracking and other unconventional techniques have doubled North American natural gas reserves to three quadrillion cubic feet — the rough equivalent of 500 billion barrels of oil, or almost double Saudi Arabia’s crude inventory. The increase came after four decades of decline.”

Mitchell, who died at the age of 94 on July 26, 2013 was a throwback to an earlier, vastly different, now unfashionable America, his astonishing success and transformative relevance to the 21st century is slaying endless herds of sacred cows and exposing endless legions of pompous pundits and false prophets on the high tech right and the green energy left as ignorant buffoons.

Yet in literal terms, Mitchell, the son of an immigrant goat-herder from Greece, invented nothing.

Instead, he took an obscure, long-sneered at technology that had been used on the fringes of the oil and gas extraction industry for more than 70 years, upgraded, improved and vastly expanded it –and made it a game changer. Where biomass, corn ethanol, wind power, solar power and all the other still fringe, peripheral and impractical technologies failed, fracking – the use of explosive hydraulic chemical cocktails to liberate oil and natural gas in shale formations – succeeded.

The bias against Mitchell and fracking was enormous and ludicrous.

In 2008, when his technology had already shown its worth and was transforming the energy map of America, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times solemnly proclaimed in his book “Hot, Flat and Crowded” that the American oil industry was the worst and most backward looking in the world because it allegedly spent less on research and development than China and other nations chasing the holy grail of limitless wind and solar power.

It was the most fatuous false prophecy since in October 1903 revered professor of mathematics and astronomy Simon Newcomb proclaimed that heavier than air flight was impossible. Less than two months later, two other unpretentious practical American geniuses, the Wright Brothers, who manufactured and repaired bicycles for a living, proved him wrong.

Mitchell too never went to Harvard, Yale or MIT (he finished top of his class at Texas A&M University), never won a Nobel Prize, and was never interviewed on Charlie Rose. Most certainly he was never in the running for a MacArthur Foundation “genius,” award.

He was one of the last survivors of unfashionable old hardhat America, practical, unpretentious America, the America that rolled up its sleeves, and got things done.  

Against all odds, Mitchell won.

Mitchell was the obvious heir of John D Rockefeller Sr. and in more ways than one. He had the entrepreneurial vision, drive, independence and courage and boldness to transform an entire continent by producing a new energy source that was cheaper, safer and more abundant than anyone had ever dreamed.

Rockefeller, it is now almost totally forgotten, saved 19th century America from the fearful curse of the thousands of people of every age who had previously been incinerated alive when the cans of kerosene fuel for cooking and heating they opened proved volatile when ignited and exploded catastrophically. Rockefeller imposed stringent quality controls and economies of scale on his unprecedented giant refineries and banished that nightmare at a stroke. (President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for one, had a lifelong horror of fire having seen as a young boy a beloved young aunt running screaming in flames ignited that way as she blazed to death).

In Mitchell’s case, his oil and natural gas produce a low carbon footprint and have none of the nightmarish environmental threats that civilian nuclear power plants generating endless quantities of eternally lethal plutonium cause.

Mitchell was no killjoy, bigot or Know-Nothing. He was an exceptionally generous donor to universities and centers of technology and research, especially across Texas. The mainstream intellectual elites, however, ignored him when they could not criticize him. His very existence exposed and refuted their own ignorance, incompetence and bigotries. Most of all, as Adrian Wooldridge wrote in the Schumpeter column of The Economist magazine on August 3, Mitchell was the embodiment of “a mighty force … America’s extraordinary capacity to reinvent itself.”

Editor's Note: This is the third of a three-part series on rebuilding America.

Martin Sieff is a former senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and former Managing Editor, International Affairs for United Press International. Sieff is the author of "That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman's Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs" (Wiley 2012) and "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East" (Regnery, 2008). He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting.  

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