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

(Hardback)

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Deep beneath frackings endless headlinessome good, some badlies a business fraught with risk and resilience, greed and graceand unrelenting madness.

The problems, the missteps, the abysmal timing, the pitiful, stumbling overreachnone were recent developments. All were part of an early onset failure, all wired into my DNA from the start. The symptomthat was my fledgling frac company. But the cause, the reason That was all me. Ill make a hurried, overly zealous decision to do something, and then just do it. Ill assume that if I do, Ill land on my feet. The bedrock of all my assumptions has always been Why shouldnt I land on my feet

Why though Why so damned cavalier

Entrepreneurialism is to blame. Its because Im an entrepreneur.

I have an entrepreneurial restlessness that overwhelms common sense and other well-regarded human instincts like fear and fear of failure. Reasonable personality traits like caution and restraint are pushed out of the way. There just isnt enough air in the room. Entrepreneurism consumes it all, sucking up every bit of energy, riding roughshod over benevolence, dignity, good and proper manners, and everything else living under the umbrella of civility.

Im not necessarily proud of it, either. Ive worked on overcoming it. Ive prayed for restraint, for anything that might suppress it. But its always there, irrepressible, agitating against authority, seeking difficulty over ease, naivety over season.

Its the same for all of us. The damned bullheadedness that marks all entrepreneursour cacophonous, messy catchall of a group that, by all reasonable standards, is a shit-poor group to belong to.

Author Bio

Dan Doyle studied English writing and geology at the University of Pittsburgh. After graduating, he started an oil and gas production company, raising money and drilling in Northwest Pennsylvanias ancient oil fields. Restless for something bigger, Doyle moved the company to Coleman County, Texas, and drilled until a prolonged downturn forced him out. He ended up at New York Universitys graduate film school, making a movie there that played at Sundance. After a decade of kicking around in the movie business, growing weary of distracted producers, he started a grip and lighting rental business in Pittsburgh. That company became the seed for Reliance Well Services, his frac company. What started with three trucks grew to two hundred. Doyle currently runs that business alongside another start-up (Arena, in 2023) that is drilling for oil in the storied Powder River Basin of Eastern Wyoming.