Part 47 (1/2)

Chapter 33.

Book woke in a teepee to a ringing phone. He reached down and grabbed his jeans then dug the cell phone out of a pocket.

'Professor.'

Nadine.

'Why aren't you out running?'

She giggled.

'I was up late.'

'I bet. Well, wake up Carla and come over.'

'Why?'

'I figured it out.'

'I did the math. The numbers don't add up.'

An hour later, they all sat in Nadine's hospital room in Alpine. Stacks of paper surrounded her in the bed.

'I talked to Professor Lawson. He said the fastest way to cut expenses is on disposal costs, said they've skyrocketed to about nine dollars per barrel of flow-back. So, if five million barrels of frack fluid go down the hole and fifty percent comes back up, that's two and a half million gallons of flow-back that's got to be injected down disposal wells. A barrel-that's how they measure everything in the business-is forty-two gallons, so two and a half million gallons is roughly sixty thousand barrels. Times nine dollars per barrel, that's half a million dollars in disposal costs per well. That's a lot of money, so I started looking at the disposal numbers.'

She held up a piece of paper from her left side.

'Well number three-twenty-four. Fracked last November seventeenth. The well log says they injected right at three million gallons of frack fluid down the hole.'

She held up another paper, this one from her right side.

'But the expense worksheets-these are the work papers the accountants generate from the actual receipts, bank statements, that sort of thing-for last year's tax return shows Barnett paid for six hundred twenty-five tanker trucks to deliver frack fluid to well number three-twenty-four on November seventeenth.'

'And?'

'And each tanker carries eight thousand gallons. Do the math, that comes to five million gallons.'

'So he's either cheating on his taxes or he's cheating on the amount of fluid used to frack that well. I understand the taxes, but why the frack fluid?'

'I'm getting there.'

She held up another piece of paper.

'After fracking, fifteen to fifty percent of the fluid comes back up the hole-remember, Billy Bob told us that?'

Book nodded.

'That's the flow-back. It's collected in an open pit then pumped into the tanker trucks to haul off to the disposal wells.'

'Okay.'

Back to the second piece of paper.

'The expense worksheet says Barnett paid for three hundred tanker loads to the disposal wells. Do the math, that's two-point-four million gallons. Which is eighty percent of three million-that's too much flow-back-but only forty-eight percent of five million. Which fits.'

'Which leads us to conclude that-'

'They used five million gallons to frack that well and recovered two-point-four million gallons of flow-back.'

'I agree.'

Another paper.

'But, this expense sheet lists all the disposal costs, but by date, not well. On November nineteenth, Barnett paid one hundred seventy thousand dollars to dispose of nineteen thousand barrels of flow-back in the Pecos County disposal well.'

'Which means?'

'He's short.'

'How?'

'Like I said, one barrel equals forty-two gallons. So they disposed of only eight hundred thousand gallons of flow-back from that well.'

'So two-point-four million gallons came back up the hole, but only eight hundred thousand gallons were trucked to the disposal wells?'

'Looks that way.'

'What happened to the other one-point-six million gallons?'

'Never made it to the disposal wells.'

'Where'd it go?'

'He dumped it,' Carla said.

'Why?'

'To save money.'

'About three hundred and forty thousand dollars,' Nadine said.

'On one well,' Carla said. 'Times a hundred wells a year, that's-'