TIMELINE: 1997-2004. Texas.

SYNOPSIS: In the 90’s our country went through an oil recession. Politics and drying up reserves forced us to rely more and more on foreign oil. Giving power over to oil rich countries like Russia. No single man in the oil business felt the well go dry more than George Mitchell. As his Texas natural gas wells dried up and his company’s stock plummeted, Mitchell needed to figure out how to get oil out of the shale reserves of his Texas fields.
A lifelong oil man facing the final chapter of his life, we’ll follow Mitchell’s journey as he also faced the fight of his life. Going up against not just father time, but also against a wife battling dementia, the young men trying to steal his company out from under him and an industry who laughed at his belief oil could be pulled from shale.
After years of trial and failure, he teamed up with Kent Bowker and Nicholas Steinsberger, a pair of engineers in their early 30’s, who helped him perfect the formula which made fracking possible. Reinvigorating the life of the old oilman, and in turn revolutionizing the gas and oil business in the US, providing the innovation of US oil companies to use fracking to draw from our vast, formerly untapped oil shale — clearing the way for not only US oil independence, but US oil dominance.

The episode will then continue to an Innovation Fair sponsored by Energy and Power companies, in which students will compete to produce cleaner burning alternatives to the engines and methods by which we use now. Highlighting the revolutionary measures the industry as a whole is taking in order to move the world into a cleaner burning future.
Our Final image will be of the new American Oil wells and the men who work on them, the same dreams and hopes in these men as the ones we started our series with.