4 Introduction
topics of regulation, taxes, and the unwelcome hand of the federal government. But after a few minutes of conversation, most of my neighbors at the bar were happy to talk about what it’s been like to live or work in the oilfield through the boom and, as the heady days of 2013 turned to wary 2014 and eventually to the doldrums of 2015, through the bust. I talked with hundreds of locals and out-of-towners, pipeliners and frackers, drill-baby-drillers and no-fracking-wayers about the oilfield. During those conversations, I learned as much about how fracking has affected the United States as I did from the hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, books, and news reports that I read during the same time. A few years into my work, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, giving a talk at the Ford School of Public Policy (where I would eventually become a lecturer) describing a recent paper on tax policy related to oil and gas development. I flew in the night before and was having dinner with Barry Rabe, the professor who had invited me to town. As we ate and talked, he asked about the places where I’d traveled to do my research. When I described the kinds of conversations I’d been having—both my interviews during the day and my informal conversations with locals at night—Barry asked if I’d thought about writing a book. I agreed it’d be a great way to document the experience but didn’t think I had the time. I was busy finishing my research, looking forward to taking on new projects, and hesitant to wade into the caustic terrain that characterizes much of the debate over fracking. But as the months went on and I traveled to even more oil and gas regions—Oklahoma, New Mexico, Ohio, California, Alaska, and others— I gathered more stories and met more people. The map in figure 1.1 shows each of the major oil- and gas-producing regions of the United States that I have visited over the past several years. This is the oilfield. The dots on the map indicate each of the more than 200,000 oil and gas wells in the United States that have been drilled directionally or horizontally, rather than vertically. These wells, particularly the horizontal ones, are where the shale revolution has taken place, and most of them have been fracked. I’ll describe what fracking is, and what it isn’t, in chapter 2, along with a discussion of why horizontal drilling, in particular, is an important part of the story.