The Frackers

I recently read "The Frackers" a 2013 book by Gregory Zuckerman which is mostly about men who backed the development of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking), a technology which has produced large unexpected increases in domestic (US) oil and natural gas production.  I found the book somewhat disappointing.  It basically is a collection of stories about some of the colorful figures involved.  It jumps from person to person and back and forth in time in a way that I found a bit confusing.  And it seems very weak on the big picture, in the mass of detail it is hard to tell which events were significant and which turned out to be unimportant.

One point I found of interest is that many of the investors in the technology appeared to be driven more by blind faith than any rational calculation of the odds.  And in some cases they were curiously blind to the fact that if the technology was as successful as they hoped the resulting increases in production would drive down prices particularly for natural gas (whose market is more local to the United States).  As a result a couple of them got badly overextended and didn't do as well from the success of the technology as one might have expected.

Overall however while this is an important story I don't think this book does a very good job of telling it.  Too much human interest detail and not enough big picture analysis.