What I Saw At The Fracking Revolution

Marty Whiteman had enough natural gas under his hayfield to make him quite rich when the fracking boom swept through his rugged corner of West Virginia 20 years ago.  But it didn't make him rich, because someone else owned the gas.

Decades before, he'd decided against buying the "mineral rights" under his land. He thought the worst thing that could happen was that a coal mine might tunnel underneath. Instead, he found himself with a 10-acre industrial site to host three gas wells. That and a dispute with a neighbor about the gas caused him to lose the use of his field.

When I met him back in 2011, he was a farmer forced to buy hay to feed his goats because he could no longer grow it. He'd taken a part-time job as a school bus driver to make ends meet.

“We haven’t farmed that ground for four years,” Whiteman told me, sitting in the living room of his single-wide mobile home, which was ringed by well sites on the surrounding hills. “They never told us it was going to affect our farming.”

Many others, of course, prospered from what became a nearly-two decade drilling boom, which many call "fracking." About 400 miles east of Whiteman's home, near New Martinsville, West Virginia, Tim Coulter told me in 2010 he was happy that a $1,000 "bonus payment" he got for signing a gas lease helped him save his horse farm from imminent foreclosure following the 2008 housing crisis of the Great Recession.

Whiteman and Coulter's differing tales were an early microcosm of how unevenly the benefits of the fracking boom would be distributed. Shale promised riches, and in some instances, it delivered, saving farms like Coulter’s. Fracking birthed tales of instant “shale-ionnaires” and oilfield strippers tucking four-figure handfuls of cash in their garter belts for a night’s work. And it also fundamentally changed the United States' position in the global energy economy, in ways that have been on prominent display over the first half of 2026.

But a lot of the people you'd expect to profit from fracking, like Whiteman, were instead crushed by it. And drilling wells could wreak environmental havoc, triggering earthquakes, ruining farmland, polluting airways and contaminating household water to the point it could catch fire.

In short: Fracking rewrote the book on American energy, globally and domestically.

But that tumultuous chapter is coming to an end, just as a war-driven energy crisis offers — or threatens — to rewrite the script once again. The irony is that the U.S. is outdoing the petro-kingdoms of the Middle East — just as the world is accelerating its turn toward renewable energy.

The easy oil is getting harder to find. Even as production continues to climb, the rate of growth is slowing. Automation is replacing oil workers the way it did coal miners. Environmental protests have moved on to data centers. America's wildcatters are again starting to scan the horizon for new discoveries abroad. Even Michael Steele, the former Republican Party chair who coined the term, "Drill, Baby, Drill," thinks the phrasehas outlived its usefulness.

So, it's worth asking what we got for this wild ride, and if it was worth the tumult? And what's next?

Fracking became a flashpoint in the culture wars as Americans clashed over economic vs. environmental concerns. Protesters — including celebrities ranging from Jane Fonda to Mark Ruffalo — took to the streets to decry fracking, organizing blockades and in some instances, succeeded in getting it out-right banned. (Even though most of those bans were in places where no one wanted to drill.)

Hydraulic fracking as a commercial enterprise has been around for decades, but the modern-day “shale boom” of the late aughts, driven by new technology, revolutionized the industry. Few dreamed this innovative way of unearthing and extracting natural gas would turn the United States into a country producing more oil every day than Saudi Arabia.

The fracking boom showed we could actually drill our way out of the dependence on foreign oil that haunted us after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This year, in the months since Iran retaliated for U.S. attacks by cutting off the oil supply in the Persian Gulf, some countries, like India and Pakistan,  faced fuel shortages. In the U.S., we’re feeling the pinch at the gas pump, but rationing and miles-long gas lines remain, for the most part, an artifact of history. Today, even if you walk everywhere or drive an electric vehicle, fracking is responsible for keeping your grocery and electric bills down.

I spent more than a decade chipping away at these issues, at the ground level and in Washington's chin-scratching sessions on the Hill, watching people elected to solve problems argue over fracking without stopping to make sure they were talking about the same thing. And that's long enough to know that some of the disagreements are elemental to our economy and politics. 

Where this goes next is an even more complicated question. But two major themes are emerging: Might the world rush to our doorstep and offer the United States the role long played by Saudi Arabia and its neighbors? Or will the world turn toward homegrown, clean energy and leave us stranded on an island of fossil fuels?

“Fracking” really isn't the best way to describe the phenomenon that made the United States an energy superpower. The correct term is "hydraulic fracturing,” and it is not a new type of drilling. Rather, it’s a step in the process of building an oil and gas well. After the well is drilled, chemical-laced fluid is pumped downhole at pressures so high that it fractures the rock, which then releases oil or gas.

And it’s been around, in one form or another, for more than a century.

Almost as soon as commercial oil production began in the 1800s, crews detonated dynamite or fired "petroleum torpedoes" into wells. The Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. performed the first “frack job” on March 17, 1949. And in 1969, the federal government triedsetting off a nuclear bomb underground to see if it would increase production (it did, but the gas was too radioactive to use).

For most of its history, fracking was a boost — like a jolt of strong coffee to wake up sluggish wells.

But, in the late 1990s, Texas oilman George Mitchell, the son of working-class Greek immigrants, succeeded in tapping deep underground shale formations long dismissed by the industry as too much trouble for too little profit. He'd argued for years with company board members over his hunch he could make them profitable. He insisted he'd perfected the recipe for cracking the rock by turning his drillbits sideways to give him more places to frack.

"They kept telling me, 'You're wasting your time,'" Mitchell, who died in 2013, told me in 2010. "Well, it worked."

As companies produced their way into a glut of natural gas, they started using it to produce oil the same way. From there, it made a lot of people wealthy and made many things — from gasoline to electricity prices and most anything made of plastic — more affordable. Some people got rich quick because of what was under their land. Others found their fields and even their houses coated in oil after a blowout.

"As a landowner, I'm very conscious of the damage done to the land," Dave Drovdal told me in 2012. He knows this firsthand: A geyser erupted on his land near Watford City, North Dakota after a well ruptured.

Despite that, he said, "as a business owner, the checks are nice."

It's an under-appreciated irony of American politics that the country's oil production hit its nadir under the oilman president, Republican George W. Bush, and began its climb to dominance under Democratic President Barack Obama.

Bush and congressional Republicans did clear away a potential regulatory hurdle in the 2005 energy bill, ensuring EPA couldn't regulate fracking with a provision that came to be known as the "Halliburton Loophole." Natural gas output started to turn upward in 2006 — accelerating under Obama — and oil output was a few years behind.

The United States passed the threshold of largest oil producer late in President Donald Trump's first term. But U.S. production kept setting and breaking new records under Biden, even as the one-term Democrat pushed electric vehicles so hard his critics took to calling it a "mandate."

The politics of oil have always been scrambled. Nationally, the oil industry is reliably Republican, and its critics tend to be Democrats. But oil and gas policy is set at the state level, and most Democratic governors have promoted drilling while seeking out a middle ground with drillers.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, might be the exception that proves the rule, having banned fracking in the Empire State by executive order in 2014. In Pennsylvania in the late 2000s, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell led the charge for drilling as it ramped up and his time in office wound down — even as he squabbled with oil producers over taxing production.

Environmentalists are a key part of the Democratic base, and they've groused on those occasions when blue-state governors side with oil and gas execs who chafe at calls for strong new regulations. In Colorado, environmentalists seethed when then-Rep. Jared Polis negotiated a deal to take new drilling restrictions off the ballot in 2014. After Polis became governor in 2019, he angered them again with moves to kill a climate bill giving the state's air quality commission more power. But he also shepherded what might be the country's strongest oil and gas regulations through the legislature, without getting his political fortunes dented by either side.

And Democrat John Hickenlooper, a onetime geologist from Colorado, managed to win election to the U.S. Senate after famously claiming he sipped fracking fluid as governor at a meeting of oil and gas CEOs in 2013.

Even at the federal level, the idea of banning fracking has never gained traction. Republicans accused Obama of a "war on fossil fuels," but he built increased natural gas production into his climate change policies — and kept oil out of the headlines during his 2012 campaign.

As one industry executive told me as the election neared that year, "They've not stopped us from drilling a single well."

Fracking's role in presidential campaigns is similarly complicated. It's generally been confined to how candidates manage questions about it in the swingiest of swing states, Pennsylvania. The state is sharply divided on questions of energy production, but Democrats like Gov. Josh Shapiro have been threading the needle successfully since the last Republican governor left office in 2015.

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, dodged fire from Trump in 2024 on her past calls to "ban fracking" (even though a president can't do that). Trump was characteristically all-in for fossil fuels. In the end, it's unclear whether either candidates' position on fracking mattered. Harris performed slightly better in Pennsylvania than she did with the national popular vote.

Fracking put a lot of people to work in the oil fields, but it killed and injured a number of them. From 2003 to 2017, 1,566 oil workers were killed on the job, dying at a rate six times the national rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In the hottest of hot spots, employers often rushed newcomers from application to drill site with nominal safety training, if any — and with machinery whirling fast around flammable air, there are a lot of ways to die on an oil rig.

Then there’s the environmental toll. Contrary to what some environmental activists say, oil and gas drilling can be done safely and cleanly. But it often isn't. Some homeowners might have thought that the well being drilled nearby wouldn't affect them — only to realize that it unleashed underground turbulence sending muck, chemicals or natural gas into their supply of underground drinking water.

"Fracking is a perfect example of something where there are net beneficiaries and net losers," said Christopher Knittel, the associate dean for Climate and Stability at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "And, unfortunately, society often doesn't look out for those net losers."

Some of those net losses can be quite dramatic.

Like Steve Lipsky's water. I visited him in 2013 at his 12,000-square-foot home in Weatherford, Texas, where Lipsky, who said he made his fortune processing mortgages, took me for a spin in his shiny new German sports car. Then he took me out back to his water well — and set a barbecue lighter next to the flowing stream of water.

It ignited a flame about the size of a tennis ball.

It wasn't the massive kitchen fireball featured in the trailer for the anti-fracking, Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland. But it was particularly notable for several reasons: In 2010, the EPA brought a rare enforcement action called an emergency order against Range Resources Corporation, the company that had drilled a gas well about 2,000 feet from Lipsky’s well. Range Resources, along with other representatives from the oil and gas industry, insisted that Lipsky was lying.

Ultimately, the fight wasn't about one water well on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. It was about whether the shale drilling that was coming to more and more communities across the country was safe and well-regulated. Lipsky’s case became one of three high-profile water pollution investigations — other two cases were in Dimock, Pennsylvania and Pavillion, Wyoming — that set the tone for the early fight over fracking.

The EPA beat a retreat, if not a hasty one, dropping the Texas enforcement action in 2012 with little explanation and no resolution. But the battle lines were drawn.

Whatever the bureaucratic outcome, Texas and the other two cases — all featured in the Gasland documentary — fueled the environmental fury against fracking.

The clamp placed on the Strait of Hormuz by Iran has reminded the world of the danger of depending on other countries to fuel their economies. And industry leaders argue it’s time for countries to start thinking more about where they get their energy supplies.

Even Andy Walz, the president of downstream, midstream and chemicals at Chevron Corporation, thinks countries could start looking more seriously at wind and solar. "I think everybody's going to want to err on the side of energy security going forward," Walz told me recently. "That could come with more renewables."

But he doesn't think countries seeking energy security in the wake of the supply crunch will drop fossil fuels completely. Instead, they'll "diversify," making sure they aren't dependent on any one country for oil or gas.

Trump, ever the salesman, senses opportunity.

"Buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty," he told the world in early April, as the war passed his four-week timeline with no end in sight. In one of his many shifts, he's even floated the idea that high oil and gasoline prices are a boon for an American industry — even if they bite American consumers.

"The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money," Trump said on Truth Social in the early weeks of the war. Of course, he's alsothreatened gasoline suppliers with a federal price-gouging investigation.

The bounty from fracking wasn't enough to prevent gas prices from going up when the strait closed down. But it meant we were far less dependent on oil from other countries, particularly the Middle East. That's what it got us: not oil "independence" as some have claimed, or oil dominance, but far more oil security than we had before fracking came along.

Take it from the Federal Reserve. In a recent report, the central bank wrote that an oil shock like the one we've seen this year, if it had occurred in the 1970s, would have caused significant joblessness. The Fed says it would have sliced the employment rate in the United States by nearly 2 percent. "Today's effect," the report says, "is essentially nil." And it boosted the American economy in a big way. In a separate report, the Fed said the oil and gas sector played an outsized role in growing the economy from 2010 to 2015, increasing U.S. gross domestic product by more than 1 percent. That, the report said, is "a substantial impact."

That's the view from the proverbial 30,000 feet. The question of whether it was worth it gets trickier the closer you get to the ground.

MIT's Knittel ran the numbers on whether it was worth it. The answer, he found, is yes: "on average."

The data "suggest that the net effect is positive, meaning that, on average, the benefits exceed the costs," according to the study he conducted with three other scholars and published in 2019. They even found an average benefit, about $2,500 annually per household. But pop the hood of the MIT study, and the benefits of fracking are far less clear. For example, they found that homeowners were five to seven times more likely to benefit from fracking than renters. For example, the new jobs delivered by a drilling boom can boost the paychecks of people with fixed mortgages — and raise the rent of retirees on fixed-incomes as the demand for housing soars.

From an environmental perspective, there are many unanswered questions, particularly around the long-term impact of pumping chemicals from the nearly 2 million fracked wells — questions that may not be answered for years or decades. Environmentalists are, for the most part, dead set against shale, but Knittel says power plants' switch from coal to gas has led the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

"Yeah, we've installed a lot of solar and wind, and we have a few EVs here and there," he said, "but there have been big climate change benefits from replacing coal with natural gas, and that's because of fracking."

But the power sector is not the only thing that matters, notes Daniel Raimi, who has been examining fracking and other issues for the Resources for the Future think tank for years.  "We've also had this boom in petrochemical manufacturing and LNG exports," Raimi said, referring to liquefied natural gas. "The boom in oil has helped keep oil prices lower than they otherwise would have been, and all of those things tend to increase emissions, and so net on net it's, it's not quite clear."

Some prognosticators — starting with the International Energy Agency — see countries that don't want to rely on other countries anymore for anything.

That could mean a far less energy dominant future, and hit Americans where they drive. Knittel, at MIT, said he can envision bleak prospects for American automakers, pointing to reports that Detroit depends heavily on high-margin, gas-guzzling cars for its profits.

All of this raises an essential question pushed aside in the Trump era: What comes after oil? Countries without their own supply, particularly in Asia, have wrestled with that future and the Hormuz oil shock will likely force more reckoning. Some countries are already moving past oil. In Uruguay, for example, nearly 99 percent of the country’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Meanwhile, the United States dithered, avoiding investing in renewables, as it started producing more oil than any country, ever.

If the world speeds up its transition to electric vehicles while the United States keeps the shift in reverse gear, the American industry could be "islanded off," from the rest of the world, as Knittel put it. Perhaps the model for the United States’ energy future isn’t Saudi Arabia, but an actual island.

"I wonder if we're like Cuba,” Raimi said. “We're going to have our ancient, oil-based cars driving around the streets, while the rest of the world is zipping around in EVs.

"I think it's a real possibility. It's not a possibility that I think is a good one."