Dr. Claude E. Cooke Jr. is the recognized father of modern ceramic proppant, the tiny beads used in fracturing wells, including shale wells. He and two colleagues were named inventors on Exxon Production Research Co.’s 1978 patent for a “hydraulic fracturing method using sintered bauxite propping agent.” He introduced the proppant to the oil and gas industry in a 1976 Society of Petroleum Engineers paper.

During the 1970s, he worked on hydraulic-fracturing-fluids technologies at Exxon’s Houston research lab, and published many technical papers. He holds 28 patents, the most recent one granted in August 2009.

After 13 years of service, he retired this past year from the board of Carbo Ceramics Inc., the world’s largest manufacturer of these proppants.

Cooke worked for ExxonMobil Corp. for 32 years, until he went into law in 1986. Today, he is a partner and patent attorney for Burleson Cooke LLP, a Houston law firm he founded with partner Rick Burleson in 2005. They recently open an office in Pittsburgh to serve clients in the Marcellus shale.

Cooke grew up in Arkansas, where his father worked as a mechanic, maintaining oil wells operated by Magnolia Oil Co., which later became Mobil Oil Corp. Years later, after earning a PhD in physics at the University of Texas, Cooke himself was employed by the former Humble Oil & Refining Co., now Exxon, which later merged with Mobil.

Oil and Gas Investor asked him about those early days of invention and proppant’s role today.

Investor: How did you get into the industry?

Cooke: After I got out of grad school, I had a natural leaning toward the oil industry. I interviewed with several non-industry companies and three oil companies, but I knew I’d go into the oil industry. I got on with Humble in 1954. I was a scientist/engineer in their research lab and spent 32 years there, with the exception of one year when they sponsored me to do post-doctoral work at Columbia.

Investor: But you are a lawyer, too.

Cooke: When I turned 40 I decided research wasn’t the optimum place to be as you age, so I decided to go to law school at the University of Houston. We had kids in high school at the time. I had always been interested in the law, even though I was always fascinated by science. I did not retire from Exxon right away. I did some litigation work after hours and continued working at Exxon on the research side. It was unusual that they let me do that.

Investor: How did the invention of proppant come about?

Cooke: Exxon needed a high-strength proppant, but they did not want to manufacture it. It was my idea to use ceramic proppant, which was made of bauxite ore. We went to the Carborundum Co. in Niagara Falls and asked them for 35,000 pounds of it to do a field test, and that blew their mind—they were only making smaller amounts used in grinding wheels.

Investor: Where was the first field test?

Cooke: On the King Ranch in South Texas, where Exxon had leased most of the ranch, or all of it. I actually still have the log of that job at home. The well was drilled to about 10,000 feet.

Investor: Why did you need a new kind of proppant?

Cooke: In those days, people used sand, or glass beads, but the industry wanted to drill deeper and deeper, to 15,000 feet. The deeper you drill, the higher the temperature and pressure, and the proppants that industry was using didn’t work. We found in our research that the glass beads lose their strength after you get to about 7,000 or 8,000 feet. The water in the reservoir makes them ineffective.

Investor: How did that first test go?

Cooke: Very well. We knew we had a successful new technology, but then, it was a matter of getting enough ceramic proppant. It took the industry years to build enough plants. Last year it produced about 2.5 billion pounds. Proppant is produced all over the world now, in Russia, China and Brazil.

The industry goes from bottleneck to bottleneck. High-strength proppant was very important for the economics of deep gas drilling, and now, the shales.

Investor: How do you like being a lawyer as opposed to doing R&D?

Cooke: I do patents, license agreements, various kinds of business arrangements, some litigation. I call it technology law. It really is fascinating. We never seem to get to the point where somebody doesn’t have a new idea.

Investor: What else does the industry need?

Cooke: Industry is looking for a low-density, high-strength proppant material. A variety of ideas have been advanced but none is adequate yet. The other thing we’d like is a better method of determining where exactly the proppant goes in the formation after we’ve done the fracture treatment. We’d like to have what people are calling “smart proppant.”

We’re just getting the easy problems solved now. The Earth is very complex, and there’s a whole new set of problems related to producing shale gas.