Chesapeake Energy says it is filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.

Chesapeake, of course, the energy giant based out of Oklahoma City, one of the fracking pioneers.

The company, once employing, about 13,000 people across all its businesses, now down to 1900, with 1300.

We're looking here at Oklahoma County.

Chesapeake Energy, the first big US fracking company, has filed bankruptcy.

Chesapeake was a pioneer in the US fracking industry, helping to turn the country into an exporter for the first time in decades.

In those early days, Chesapeake was run by its larger-than-life co-founder, Aubrey McClendon.

Here he is addressing Harvard students at the height of the shale boom.

Over the last 150 years, you've known natural gas is good, but you haven't been sure about its abundance.

And in fact, from my perspective, when I started this company in 1989, I was 30 years old.

I didn't know where the future of the industry was going, certainly didn't know where natural gas was headed.

But we founded our company on the idea that if we were to find our way in the world, we had to look at geology and engineering from a different perspective than what the bigger companies were doing.

We had to go look for unconventional reservoirs.

The conventional reservoirs were basically locked up by the exons of the world in the larger independent companies.

And so my partner and I, who we had been partners since I was 23, on a private basis, we decided to go found this company with $50,000 and we had 10 employees at the time.

And the idea was, let's go look for natural gas in unconventional reservoirs.

And at the time, that was mainly fractured carbonates today, that's shale.

He sounds pretty tame there, but McClendon's rep was that he could sell shale to anyone.

My name is Clark Williams-Derry, and I'm an analyst with IEFA, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

So Aubrey McClendon was kind of, you know, the quintessential shale booster.

He was somebody who, whether due to force of personality or because he was just a true believer, or he was just an incredibly good salesman, he got people to invest in his company.

Shale wasn't an easy sell, or it turns out a good buy for anyone.

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