Of Roughnecks & Riches: A Start-Up in the Great American Fracking Boom

Deep beneath fracking’s endless headlines—some good, some bad—lies a business fraught with risk and resilience, greed and grace…and unrelenting madness.

The missteps, the abysmal timing, the pitiful, stumbling overreach, none were recent developments. All were part of an early onset failure, all wired into my DNA from the start. The symptom that was my fledgling frack company, but the cause, the reason, that was all me. I’ll make a hurried, overly zealous decision to do something, then just ...