The well that started it all for Dan Doyle in Wyoming had already been blown in two by a nitrogen bomb.
Years before Doyle came along, a contractor working a wellbore in Niobrara County was running a coil tubing unit on a nitrogen assist when something went wrong.
A large volume of liquid nitrogen ended up downhole. As it expanded into a gas inside the confined wellbore, it detonated.
"It'll blow," Doyle told Cowboy State Daily. "It's a bomb — a nitrogen bomb."
"We thought maybe luck will finally change and we'll be there to witness the change," he said, explaining why he wanted to drill a new hole in this old, forsaken oil well.
That well ultimately produced, and so did several others. Another five or six are planned for this year.
Doyle's company, Reliance Well Services, hosts frack crews of 15 to 30 hands at Newcastle hotels and a company man camp.
Many of the workers are former deep-mine coal workers from Appalachia and former Gillette coal miners, he said.
Doyle has a geology degree and worked the Texas oil patch in the 1980s. After the oil market tanked, he went to NYU graduate film school, had a short film at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, then went back to oil.
Now he has a new book out from Post Hill Press titled “Of Roughnecks & Riches.”
Wall Street Journal writer Gregory Zuckerman, author of “The Frackers,” calls the book as "a dramatic dive into an energy revolution that has upended the nation and the world."
From his wellpads in eastern Wyoming, Doyle is both driving and chronicling that revolution. As he did for his new book, he’s collecting — and sharing — the best stories.
Oklahoma Knife
The year was 2008. Oil hit $147 a barrel before crashing by 80%.
A pair of brothers in Bristow, Oklahoma, were building Doyle's first set of frack trucks at a startup company. Doyle had paid them a $250,000 deposit.
Four months in, the older brother stopped answering the phone.
The younger brother sent a panicked Thanksgiving-weekend email warning that promised parts had never been delivered, and that he himself feared he could end up, as the email put it in the book, "a dead man (for real)."
Doyle flew to Tulsa the next morning and drove to Bristow.
In the back of a trailer office, Doyle called the deal off and told the brothers he was taking his trucks back to Pennsylvania.
That’s when one brother pulled out a knife and said, “This is what I do to guys like you.”
Doyle decided it was a bluff, jabbing a finger into the man’s belly and telling him to take it easy.
Reading people in tense moments became a true job requirement, and as Doyle tried to build a client roster for his fracking services, he ran into someone else with show biz dreams.
A prospective customer named Tom had a teenage son trying to break into the film business. Doyle still had connections to the industry through an equipment rental company.
He offered to take the kid on a working delivery, a couple of rolls of window gels for a Pittsburgh movie set.
The movie was “Love and Other Drugs,” a 20th Century Fox production starring Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Doyle knew the security guards and got himself and Tom Jr. waved through.
"Tom was thrilled," Doyle writes in the book, "and I was thinking mission accomplished, especially as we walked past actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Judy Greer."
Crew members Doyle knew warned him on the way in that this was a closed set. He kept walking.
Hathaway then walked past barefoot in nothing but a bathrobe.
Doyle and Tom Jr. wound up standing inside a bedroom set so restricted, Doyle writes, that even the film's producer was banned.
The key grip, a friend of Doyle's, leaned in.
"What're you doing here with that guy?" he asked, eyeing Tom Jr.
"His dad's giving me some frack jobs," Doyle answered.
"You don't get the f*** outta here," the friend hissed back, "I'm gonna throw you out myself!"
They got thrown off the set. Doyle got the frack work. He and Tom went on to do nearly 100 jobs together.
Pennsylvania Raid
Doyle's company survived as the chaos kept coming.
One of the wildest sequences in “Of Roughnecks & Riches” unfolds on a Venango County, Pennsylvania, hilltop where Doyle's crew is fracking the first of six promised wells for a customer the book calls Big Foot, who is a big man.
The job is going well. By the second stage, Big Foot is comfortable enough to tell Doyle he wants Reliance back for the other five wells on the lease.
Then a white SUV blows past in a cloud of dust. Behind it, a pickup. Behind that, another SUV. Then two more.
All bear the green-and-blue logo of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Five state vehicles end up circling a hillside.
Doyle's frack hands stop work to gawk.
Two water-truck drivers, one of them a neighbor with wells of his own on the same hill, pulled Doyle aside and told him what they have just heard from a DEP inspector.
A few hundred feet from Doyle's frack pad, the inspectors had found a stone pit, freshly covered over with dirt but ringed with tire tracks.
They believed someone had been using it to dump production brine — the salty wastewater that comes up out of oil wells. The pit sat directly above the cisterns supplying drinking water to the entire township.
The fractured ground on that hilltop made it easy for contamination to channel down through the rock and into the water supply.
The job finishes. The next morning, Big Foot calls.
"It's too hot on that hill right now," he tells Doyle in the book. "I'm hearing all sorts of things. Something about someone might've been dumping brine up there. I don't know, I wasn't there. But it wasn't me and I doubt it was you."
He pulls the remaining five wells anyway. He never calls back. Doyle later hears Big Foot finished the job with one of Reliance's competitors.
Unique Path
While attending New York University, to pay the bills, Doyle became a resident assistant (RA) in the dorms, which got him free room and board.
One Halloween night, working as the RA in a 15-story building near 10th and Fifth Avenue, somebody pulled a fire alarm. Then out on the sidewalk, a student had a seizure.
The crowd parted and Doyle heard a voice saying "excuse me, excuse me." He assumed it was an EMT.
It was a man dressed as Batman.
"It was like the most authentic Batman you've ever seen," Doyle recalled. "He said, 'Hey, can I be of assistance here, sir?' And I go, 'Uh, no Batman, I think we got it now.'"
Doyle’s signature work in film was “Burning Love.”
After its turn at Sundance, The Independent Film & Video Monthly reported that, “Dan Doyle's ‘Burning Love’ was picked up by Good Machine — cofounded by producer Ted Hope, known for 'The Ice Storm,’ ‘Happiness' and 'In the Bedroom.'”
At the time, this is how Doyle described his experience to a reporter: “I'm no richer. I met a lot of people and hooked up with producers, but as to whether or not any of it works out, I have no idea.'"
After his minor Sundance splash, Doyle kicked around in the movie business and did gear rentals. He eventually concluded show biz was not for him.
He sold his rental house and used the proceeds to start a frack company.
Wyoming Arrival
The Niobrara position came years later, after a long search through the Appalachian Basin and a sweep through Nebraska and Colorado.
"I had no working knowledge of Wyoming when we acquired a position in Niobrara County," Doyle said. "We just hired local people that did and kind of figured things out. It shouldn't have worked so easily, but it's worked out well."
The strategy was aimed at cost.
Owning a frack company meant Doyle's outfit could complete its own wells without paying outside service margins.
Once the team decided “the rock was real,” he said they invested in a deep water well, above-ground Poseidon tanks holding roughly 400,000 barrels of water, brine storage, two disposal wells, and a couple of 200-foot buildings for frack sand.
"This isn't a very flashy part of Wyoming," Doyle said. "It's about a mile deep. You're going to do well by watching your costs."
"The oil and gas industry is harsh," he writes. "The environment down below and almost universally above is harsh. Its people — the ones who go and get it out of the ground — are accustomed to harsh. We have to be operating in the mud and brittle cold.”
Doyle traces his own willingness to keep going back to his late father, a serial entrepreneur who started a steel fabrication business, drilled an oil well and ran a commercial fishing business in succession.
"I have an entrepreneurial restlessness that overwhelms common sense and other well-regarded human instincts like fear and fear of failure," Doyle writes. "Reasonable personality traits like caution and restraint are pushed out of the way."
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
