Where

What Are Shale Plays, and Where Are the Major Shale Plays in the United States? As mentioned, the purpose of hydraulic fracturing is to access natural gas and oil trapped in shale formations, also known as “plays.” Shale plays are found across the United States...

How

How Do We Hydrofracture a Well? Let’s begin with the equipment. Roughnecks rely on tall metal drill rigs (such as the rig depicted on the cover of this book) that rise up to four stories tall, which lower diamond-tipped drill bits and sections of steel...

Introduction: A Twenty-First-Century Bonanza

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, America has found a new source of fuel. It is affordable, burns cleaner than coal and oil, and there is so much of it that some believe that supplies will last for over 100 years. What is...

Beyond Hydrofracking

The shale gas industry is still in its adolescence. And as adolescents are wont to do, it presents us with a dilemma: while the energy supplies in shale are too important to overlook, the potential health and environmental impacts of extracting them are too great...

The Case Against Hydrofracking

Hydrofracturing is not a gentle process. Sucking oil and gas from dense shale formations involves drilling, explosions, toxic chemicals, and millions of gallons of water pumped at crushing pressures. Drillers maintain that these processes are well understood and tightly controlled and take place far below...

What

So What Is Hydrofracking, and Why Has It Become So Central to the Energy Landscape? As mentioned in the introduction, hydrofracking is defined in different ways by different people. To those in the energy industry, it refers purely to the process of injecting fluid—which consists...

Energy In Context: A Fossil Fuel Primer

What Are Fossil Fuels? Buried deep in the earth are the remnants of earlier life forms—hundreds of millennia of rotting vegetation, decaying animals, and marine plankton. Today this “organic material” (so-called because it was once alive) has turned into rock that is laden with carbon,...

The Future of Fracking

There is now a great deal of research and assessment being done on hydrofracking by government agencies, the industry, academics, inventors, and environmentalists, and the fruits of their labors will be revealed in the next few years. While the politics and economics of fracking remain...

The Case for Hydrofracking

Who Benefits? Many have profited financially from hydrofracking, from George Mitchell, who made billions of dollars by inventing “slickwater” fracturing, to truck drivers in North Dakota, who saw their earnings jump to $2,000 a week hauling fracking fluid, to rural landowners in New York State,...