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The Boom
Book

The Boom

How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

Russell Gold
Wall Street Journal Books, 2014
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Background

Recommendation

The saga of how hydraulic fracking changed US energy production features charismatic wildcatters and the science and history of oil and gas exploration. Masterful reporter Russell Gold’s narrative, for good or ill, gets somewhat flooded in minute – though fascinating – details of the history of oil fields, specific wells, exacting particulars about gas and oil exploration tools and materials, and personal anecdotes about meetings with industry honchos and engineers. Gold writes so smoothly, the river of information will carry you along. getAbstract recommends his thorough, professional overview to people interested in fracking and its impact on the energy industry and the environment – as long as they’re capable of patient fascination.

Summary

The New Energy Order

The owners of undeveloped land in Pennsylvania were surprised to receive an energy company’s unsolicited offer of $400,000, plus royalties, to drill on their land for natural gas. They had never heard of the company, Oklahoma’s Chesapeake Energy, and the area where it wanted to drill was useless to local farmers. Unbeknownst to the landowners, their farmland sat on the Marcellus Shale formation, running from New York to Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The owners discovered that Chesapeake was the largest well driller in the world, with a 2002 annual budget of more than $20 billion. Every year, Chesapeake drills upward of 1,000 wells, using fracking to unleash trapped natural gas from inside rock – mostly shale – formations, some of which are a mile deep.

Chesapeake and the other entrepreneurial frackers that first exploited such untapped reserves were independent firms, not global energy giants, such as Exxon or Mobil. Chesapeake took risks to make its wells profitable. The gas lay beneath suburban housing developments and remote, rocky farms. Once discovered, its abundance upset expectations about available energy from nuclear and...

About the Author

Russell Gold reports on energy in The Wall Street Journal. His coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill earned a Gerald Loeb Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

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