Shale Boom: The Barnett Shale Play and Fort Worth by Diana Davids Hinton (review)

It is an old story in oil history: a new technology—and the right price—result in the discovery and economic production of oil and gas that was once thought to be unrecoverable. The modern revolution in fracking began in North Texas, where a single entrepreneur, George P. Mitchell, pushed his engineers for twenty years to innovate a way to recover natural gas (and later oil) from tight shale rock. Through extensive oral history interviews and careful attention to primary sources, Diana Davids Hinton in Shale Boom: The Barnett Shale Play and Fort Worth first describes the context that led Mitchell to develop modern fracking. The book then chronicles the small oil companies that made large fortunes by following in Mitchell’s footsteps, who were themselves followed by the large oil companies that made fortunes buying their smaller counterparts; in the end, the international oil companies bought out everyone. This is the story Shale Boom tells, and Hinton excels in telling it. She weaves a story of courageous, hardworking, risk-taking entrepreneurs who do business with a handshake and make spectacular fortunes.

Of course those fortunes, in part, depend on others shouldering the environmental costs of oil and gas development. These costs became painfully clear when fracking entered the city of Fort Worth, Texas, in the early 2000s. Hinton describes the growing environmental opposition to fracking and does a fine job depicting the individuals and controversies that defined the struggle between the industry and its growing chorus of critics. The narrative alternates between accusations of environmental damage and the industry’s denials. But Hinton’s strained effort “to present the perspectives of the various stakeholders” renders the latter half of the book closer to long-form journalism than history (p. 11). The reader is left with many questions: Has all the fracking activity in North Texas produced a decline in air quality? If fracking itself does not cause groundwater contamination, but it is readily acknowledged that sloppy practices can indeed produce contamination, were those sloppy practices widespread? And if they were, does it matter that fracking itself is not supposed to produce groundwater contamination? The narrative further whipsaws the reader by juxtaposing critics who charged that environmental regulators in Texas were derelict in their duties with conservatives who attacked the Environmental Protection Agency in an inept enforcement case. The reader is left confused as to the state of environmental and energy politics in Texas: Is the state government captured by the energy industry?

The book studiously traces the economic benefits of the boom. And in its last pages the book suggests for the first time that the greatest beneficiaries of the resulting bust are the American working poor and those on limited income who benefit from lower oil and gas prices. This argument is hard to square with the narrative of newly minted millionaires and billionaires in the first half of the book. Is it not the working poor who are most likely to suffer from the water and air pollution that might be caused by fracking? Closer attention to these questions would have produced a history more confident in its interpretations.

It is never easy to be the first historian to a topic, particularly one that has so fully transformed U.S. energy and environmental history. Shale Boom is the first of what will be many histories of fracking. As such, it is a welcome addition to modern energy history.