Blowout

Mitchell is a pioneer in the oil and gas industry and the de facto trailblazer for fracking in America. His life story is a complicated mix between capitalist parable and cautionary tale. A native of Galveston, Texas, Mitchell was the son of a Greek immigrant who worked as a goat herder. After studying petroleum engineering and geology at Texas A&M, Mitchell became an oil and gas entrepreneur. Even when virtually all conventional wisdom in the industry led away from fracking, Mitchell remained resolute in finding a way to extract natural gas through the method. Mitchell’s persistence paid off for him and his company, when nearly 200 billion cubic feet of natural gas was discovered where Mitchell had been injecting slickwater. This, according to Maddow, was “a hinge on which modern history has turned” (27). Mitchell succeeded, turning enormous profits through his efforts in the industry, but his legacy is complicated by the fact that his fracking breakthroughs may have permanently impacted the environment in countless ways.

Tillerson’s impact on the oil and gas industry is one of the central threads throughout this book, from his unflinching dedication to company profits during his tenure as ExxonMobil CEO to his questionable decision-making in his secretary of state role in the White House. Tillerson is portrayed as unwavering in his commitment to his own convictions, and by extension Big Oil as a whole. He is the epitome of the modern oil man who downplays the environmental impacts of practices such as fracking or offshore drilling in the name of economic stability and job creation.

Harold Glenn Hamm, an Oklahoma native most notable for his role in the development of the shale oil resources of the Bakken formation, is an American oil and gas industry executive and entrepreneur. Hamm was recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. At the height of his oil wealth, his net worth reached a staggering $17 billion, which made him Oklahoma’s richest oilman by far. Hamm was also named an energy advisor to Mitt Romney, during Romney’s 2012 bid for the US presidency. In a varied cast of characters in the cutthroat oil and gas industry, Hamm is another epitomized version of the modern American oilman.

McClendon is perhaps the strongest and most direct representation of the exuberances of the oil industry in America, and how its consequent wealth spreads and accumulates. As McClendon amassed personal wealth through his Oklahoma-based company Chesapeake Energy, he became an increasingly larger-than-life character and one of America’s greatest fracking apologists. In an effort to completely provide his hometown of Oklahoma City with an unprecedented morale boost, McClendon was the driving force that brought the Oklahoma City Thunder over from Seattle. McClendon lived a life of luxury, but on March 2, 2016, he died after driving his Chevy Tahoe straight into a concrete wall, just one day after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy.

One of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, Igor Sechin appears in Blowout largely as a henchman for the Russian president turned oil magnate. After working with Putin for several years, proving his loyalty in a variety of ways, Sechin was appointed to be the most powerful oil man in Russia during the Putin presidency. As Sechin grew in power, despite his checkered and violent past, he appealed to men like Rex Tillerson, who was charmed by Sechin’s “ability to pull the right levers inside the Kremlin” (174), due largely to his unshakeable loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

Khodorkovsky is an exiled Russian oligarch. Maddow details his rise and fall extensively to illustrate what happens to anyone who opposes Vladimir Putin and the siloviki agenda. Chapter 3 describes how his efforts to establish Yukos as a major oil industry player were ultimately thwarted by Putin’s political machinations.