40 Fun Facts About Fracking

Project Gasbuggy, a 1967 US government test in New Mexico, tried to shatter gas-bearing rock using what?

A nuclear bomb of 29 kilotons was detonated 4,227 feet underground as part of Operation Plowshare, a program seeking peaceful uses for atomic explosions.

Which 2010 documentary by Josh Fox made fracking a national issue with scenes of tap water set alight?

Gasland was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and became a rallying point for the anti-fracking movement.

Cheap natural gas from fracking sped the decline of which fuel, long the leading source of US electricity?

Coal produced 51% of US electricity in 2001 but about 16% by 2023, as cheaper gas and renewables pushed plants to close.

Which US state suffered a magnitude 5.8 earthquake near Pawnee in 2016, amid a surge tied to its oil industry?

Oklahoma's Pawnee earthquake of September 2016 was the strongest ever recorded in the state, five years after another damaging quake struck near the town of Prague.

The Bakken formation, named after a local farmer, fueled a fracking-driven oil boom centered on which US state?

North Dakota farmer Henry Bakken owned the land where drillers first found the rock, which lies entirely underground with no outcrop at the surface.

Which actor co-wrote and starred in Promised Land, a 2012 drama about a gas company buying rural drilling rights?

Matt Damon wrote the screenplay with co-star John Krasinski and was set to direct before Gus Van Sant took over.

The word fracking, now standard in news headlines, is short for which two-word engineering term?

Hydraulic fracturing is still the name the oil industry tends to use, sometimes clipped to fracing with no k, while fracking dominates in popular media.

Besides water, which material makes up most of a typical fracking fluid, wedging the cracks in the rock open?

Sand makes up about 9.5% of a typical mix; when the pumps stop, the grains stay behind and hold the cracks open so oil and gas can flow.

Which European country outlawed fracking in 2011, a ban its Constitutional Council upheld two years later?

France passed the ban after public pressure, citing the precautionary principle; a US-based company, Schuepbach Energy, challenged it and lost.

Which British prime minister briefly lifted England's fracking moratorium in 2022, before a successor restored it?

Liz Truss lifted the moratorium during the shortest premiership in British history; Rishi Sunak reinstated it in October 2022.

Which Texas oilman is often called the father of fracking for unlocking natural gas from the Barnett Shale?

George Mitchell, the son of a Greek goat herder, spent the 1980s and 1990s testing techniques before one finally made shale gas pay.

The 2005 law exempting fracking from federal injection rules is nicknamed after which oilfield services company?

Halliburton, once run by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, also carried out the first commercial fracking jobs back in 1949.

The very first fracking experiment took place in 1947 at the Hugoton gas field in which US state?

Kansas hosted the trial in Grant County, at a limestone gas well 2,400 feet deep, and it flopped: the well's output barely changed.

The first fracking test in 1947 pumped in which everyday fuel, thickened into a gel much like napalm?

Gasoline was the base of that first batch: 1,000 gallons of it, gelled into what was essentially napalm, were pumped down the well.

Which shale formation under Pennsylvania and West Virginia became the largest source of natural gas in the US?

Marcellus shale runs beneath much of Appalachia, reaching into southeast Ohio, and fracking turned it into the country's biggest gas producer.

Which US state, with no known frackable gas of its own, became the first to ban fracking by law in 2012?

Vermont's legislature voted 103–36 for the ban, a preventative step that Governor Peter Shumlin signed into law in May 2012.

Which US state banned high-volume fracking in 2014, citing health risks, while neighboring Pennsylvania kept drilling?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the statewide ban in December 2014, after a state review of the potential public health effects.

Two small earthquakes in 2011 halted Britain's first big fracking job at Preese Hall, near which seaside resort?

Blackpool sits on the Lancashire coast, where one tremor reached magnitude 2.3 and deformed the well; England imposed a moratorium on fracking in 2019.

Fracking revived which basin under West Texas and New Mexico, making it the highest-producing US oil field?

The Permian Basin was thought to have peaked in the early 1970s, until fracking and other new drilling technology sent its output soaring again.

A 2005 energy law exempted fracking from the underground injection rules of which US environmental statute?

Safe Drinking Water Act rules still bite in one case: the exemption does not cover fracking fluids that contain diesel fuels.

Fracking made the US a major oil exporter, but dramatically increased leaks of which potent greenhouse gas?

Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas, and some evidence suggests the leaks may cancel out the climate benefit of burning gas instead of other fossil fuels.

What is the oil industry's name for the solid grains in fracking fluid that keep new cracks from closing?

Proppant can be tough ceramic beads or bauxite in the deepest wells, where the pressure would crush weaker grains.

What do drillers call the injected fracking fluid that returns to the surface when a new well is commissioned?

Flowback comes up over about a week, mixed with oil, gas and brine, and it is only a portion of the fluid that was pumped down.

Most earthquakes tied to America's oil and gas boom are linked to which practice, rather than to fracking itself?

Wastewater disposal pumps salty waste fluid deep underground for good, and the added pressure can make long-quiet faults slip.

Shale gas needs fracking because shale is very low in which rock property, measured in millidarcies?

Permeability describes how easily fluid moves through rock; below about 0.1 millidarcy a rock counts as impermeable, so its gas stays locked in until cracks are made.

Which thickener, made from a bean grown mainly in India, is added to fracking fluid to help it gel?

Guar gum is the same additive that keeps ice cream smooth, and India produces nearly 80% of the world's supply of the bean.

Which Avengers actor, dubbed anti-fracking's first famous face, founded the group Water Defense in 2010?

Mark Ruffalo took up the cause in 2008, when gas companies were eyeing his family's land in the town of Callicoon.

Oil, gas and fracking in Texas are regulated by which misleadingly named state agency, founded in 1891?

Railroad Commission is a name that outlived its job: the agency stopped regulating railroads in 2005 but still oversees the state's oil and gas wells.

In 2014, which oil exporter urged OPEC toward higher output and lower prices to squeeze high-cost US shale?

Saudi Arabia hoped cheap crude would erode shale's profits; oil sank below $30 a barrel by January 2016, yet shale survived and sapped the cartel's market power.

The Barnett Shale, America's most productive shale gas field through the 2000s, lies beneath which Texas city?

Fort Worth sits right on top of the field, so wells went into urban areas, and some local governments looked at drilling beneath public parks.

Which South American country is home to Vaca Muerta, a major shale oil and gas formation in northern Patagonia?

Argentina's Vaca Muerta, whose name is Spanish for dead cow, has drawn drillers since a large oil discovery there in 2010.

Which country was judged to hold the world's largest recoverable shale gas reserves in a 2011 US government survey?

China was credited with 1,275 trillion cubic feet of recoverable shale gas, a figure the same agency trimmed to 1,115 trillion two years later.

Shale, the rock most fracking targets, formed from compacted layers of which fine-grained sediment?

Mud rich in clay flakes hardens into shale, which is the most common sedimentary rock and tends to split into thin layers.

Short of pipelines, Bakken oil drillers burned off surplus natural gas on the spot in which wasteful practice?

Flaring was costing Bakken producers an estimated $100 million a month in lost gas, by one 2013 study's count.

Which artist started Artists Against Fracking with her son, a group that also counted Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga?

Yoko Ono founded it with her son Sean Lennon, and by August 2012 the group counted 180 artists, Robert De Niro among them.

Which company's fracking at Preston New Road in Lancashire was halted by a magnitude 2.9 earthquake in August 2019?

Cuadrilla stopped work after the tremor, and that November the government imposed a moratorium on fracking in England.

Which Texas city's voters approved a fracking ban in 2014, only for a new state law to overrule it?

Denton's referendum passed with 59% of the vote, but Texas then enacted a law giving the state exclusive jurisdiction over oil and gas operations.

Which type of fracking fluid, first tried on the Barnett Shale in 1997, proved the field's biggest breakthrough?

Slickwater was applied by engineer Nick Steinsberger, and his 1998 test well outproduced every earlier well his company had drilled.

Which radioactive element in fracking waste from Pennsylvania shale wells raised alarm about river discharges?

Radium in creek sediment below one Pennsylvania treatment plant was found at 200 times background levels by Duke University researchers.

Which material is typically pumped around a well's casing pipe to hold it in place deep underground?

Cement usually holds only the lower part of each pipe string; deeper strings are not normally cemented all the way to the surface.