Shutterstock/Mathew Risley
The 120,000 or so residents of The Woodlands, the suburban satellite of Houston, Texas where I stayed recently during the CERAWeek energy conference in the city, count themselves among the most fortunate in the United States.
In rolling green hills, with golf courses, lakes, upmarket social and lifestyle amenities and some of the most sought-after real estate in America, they live a privileged life, even by the standards set by the legendary Texan oil tycoons.
The story of how The Woodlands sprang into existence in Texas in the 1970s offers a snapshot into the workings of the mind of an energy entrepreneur, and could be a lesson for the Arabian Gulf on how to better organise comfortable and sustainable urban life in a hydrocarbon environment.
The development, a 30-minute drive north up the I45 interstate (if Houston’s unpredictable traffic allows), was the brainchild of George Mitchell, a Texan oilman from the nearby city of Galveston.
Mitchell died aged 94 just over a decade ago. He is often referred to as a “wildcatter”, an engineer continually on the hunt for oil reserves in unproven territory. It is true that Mitchell did drill an awful lot of wells, for both oil and gas, in his time.
But the real reason for his place in the petroleum pantheon is as the inventor of the technique of “fracking”, which, in 2025, allows President Trump to claim US “energy dominance” over the rest of the world.
The story (gratis Lawrence Wright in his God Save Texas travelogue) goes that Mitchell’s company was in deep financial trouble, and on the hook to fulfil a contract to supply gas to the city of Chicago, when he and other oil engineers came up with the technique of horizontal drilling into fractured shale rocks known to contain inaccessible “tight” oil supplies.
George Mitchell was that rare thing, an oilman with a social conscience
It is essentially that same technique which contributes a massive chunk to the United States’ record output of 13 million barrels a day of oil equivalent, much of it from the Permian basin a few hundred miles to the west of The Woodlands.
Mitchell was also that rare thing, an oilman with a social conscience. He had, early on in his career, become interested in theories of what we now call “sustainability”: how to balance dwindling natural resources with unstoppable population growth and environmental degradation.
The abundance of relatively clean natural gas – in comparison to coal – freed up by fracking, he believed, was the key to solving this problem. In 1974 he began to put his plans into practice in The Woodlands.
Although I made the daily return trip to downtown Houston via Uber, The Woodlands is now more than just a dormitory town, but an urban destination in its own right, with corporate campuses of many of the big names of US energy, Occidental, Chevron, Baker Hughes and Halliburton among them.
Over an excellent dinner at the Truluck steak and seafood restaurant at Hughes’ Landing on Woodlands Lake, my host, a friend from his days with Exxon Mobil’s Middle East operations based in Dubai, told me how he and his family seldom had cause to travel to “H City” or beyond these days. “We’ve got everything we need here.”
However, Mitchell’s faith in shale is being put to the test in other parts of Texas. Later in his career, he realised that tighter regulation was needed over fracking.
In West Texas, in the heart of the Permian Basin, around Midland and Odessa, lawsuits and complaints are building up on account of the environmental and human costs of shale exploration as the easier wells are exhausted and more challenging ones opened in more populous areas.
There has even been reported an increase in seismic activity, which some allege is due to the destabilising effects of the vast amounts of water pumped deep underground as part of the fracking process.
There were no earthquake tremors at the Truluck that evening, nor any in my week-long stay in the Woodlands. But it is something the state authorities and the oil industry will have to take increasingly seriously, especially in Trump’s era of “drill, baby, drill.”
The Hill website reports that Texas derived a record $27 billion in taxes and revenues from the oil industry, which employed nearly half a million people in well-paid jobs.
Is The Woodlands project in Texas a model for how Middle East initiatives in sustainability, like Masdar and Neom, should proceed?
I’m sure Gulf Arabs, who have a great affinity with Texas, know of and can learn from the sustainable town north of Houston. But where is the Middle East equivalent of Mitchell?
Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia
