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for my education. The first showed the U.S. production of crude oil. In 1970 American oil production reached nearly ten million barrels a day; that summit was followed by a long, slow slide, decade after decade, touching bottom in 2008 at little more than five million barrels a day. The decline was marked by oil embargoes, price shocks, gas lines, shifting geopolitical alliances, wars in the Middle East, and the fear of the world economy being held captive to oil states that were often intensely anti-American. Then, around the time Barack Obama was elected president, something startling happened. U.S. production shot back up, approaching its all-time high. On the graph, it looked like a flagpole. “In the span of five years, we go from 5.5 million barrels a day to 9.5 million, almost doubling the U.S. output,” Fowler said. It was the fastest growth in oil production ever seen. The difference was fracking and horizontal drilling techniques.
    Five thousand energy-related companies make their home in Houston, the world’s energy capital, and the effect of the crash in prices caused by the shale oil boom was evident in the slowdown in home sales, empty office buildings, and diminished traffic on the freeways. One Houston restaurant in the storied River Oaks neighborhood, Ouisie’s Table, began offering a three-course meal each Wednesday night pegged to the price of a barrel of oil—when I visited in the spring of 2016, it was about $38. At oil’s peak in June 2014, that meal might have cost $115. Between January 2015 and December 2016, more than a hundred U.S. oil and gas producers declared bankruptcy, half of them in Texas. That doesn’t count the financial impact on the pipeline, storage, servicing, and shipping companies that depend on the energy business, and the colossal debt—$74 billion so far, much of it unsecured—that these failures leave behind.
    Recently, I drove to North Texas to visit the well that started the revolution, the S. H. Griffin No. 4. It stands amid a little community of prefab homes and tidy brick bungalows, marking the extended reach of the Fort Worth suburbs. The town used to be called Clark, but a decade ago the mayor made a deal with a satellite network to provide ten years of free basic service to the two hundred residents in return for renaming the town after the company, using all capital letters, as in the company logo. Satellite dishes still sit atop many houses there, and even though the agreement has expired, the town’s name remains—DISH.
    This part of Texas is flat grassland dotted with scrubby mesquite. You see a lot of heavy industry associated with pipelines and drilling. Tanker trucks, which carry the millions of gallons of water required to frack a well, and tractor trailers known as SandCans, which haul silica to the site, have worn down the roads. Each drilling rig is huge and arrives disassembled, in a dozen truckloads of parts. There’s also the four-inch metal pipe for the hole, which comes in thirty-foot lengths weighing six hundred pounds apiece; the concrete to encase the pipe; and the carbon-steel transmission pipes, between two and three feet in diameter, that transport the gas to storage containers. About 1,200 truck deliveries are needed for every well that is fracked.
    Before the fracking comes the drilling. In the Barnett, holes go down about six thousand to eight thousand feet, substantially below the water table. Once the desired depth is reached, the drill slowly bends until it becomes horizontal, for as much as another ten thousand feet.
    There is a science-fiction quality to the fracking process. Several tubes, called perforating guns, are snaked to the end of the well bore. The guns contain explosives that rupture the surrounding strata. Meanwhile, on the surface, twenty or so trucks line up on either side of the well. Pipes and hoses emanating from the trucks connect to a metal apparatus known as a manifold, which looks like a giant alien insect. A