page_title: Hydraulic fracturing in the United States
section_title: Massive hydraulic fracturing
hierarchical_section_title: Hydraulic fracturing in the United States / History / Massive hydraulic fracturing
caption_attribution_description: English: Areas of natural gas production from tight (&lt;0.1 mD) reservoirs other than shales, USA
context_page_description: Hydraulic fracturing in the United States began in 1949. According to the Department of Energy, by 2013 at least two million oil and gas wells in the US had been hydraulically fractured, and that of new wells being drilled, up to 95% are hydraulically fractured. The output from these wells makes up 43% of the oil production and 67% of the natural gas production in the United States. Environmental safety and health concerns about hydraulic fracturing emerged in the 1980s, and are still being debated at the state and federal levels.
  New York banned massive hydraulic fracturing by executive order in 2012. Vermont, which has no known frackable gas reserves, banned fracking preventatively in May 2012. In March 2017, Maryland became the first state in the US with proven gas reserves to pass a law banning fracking. On May 8, 2019 Washington became the fourth state to ban fracking when Governor Jay Inslee signed SB 5145 into law after it passed the State Senate by a vote of 29-18 and the House 61–37. Washington is a non-oil and gas state that had no fracking operations when the bill was passed.
context_section_description: In the 1960s, American geologists became increasingly aware of huge volumes of gas-saturated rocks with permeability too low (generally less than 0.1 millidarcy) to recover the gas economically. The US government experimented with using underground nuclear explosions to fracture the rock and enable gas recovery from the rock. Such explosions were tried in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico (Project Gasbuggy, 1967), and the Piceance Basin of Western Colorado (Project Rulison, 1969, and Project Rio Blanco, 1973) but the results were disappointing, and the tests were halted. The petroleum industry turned to the new massive hydraulic fracturing technique as the way to recover tight gas.
  The definition of a massive hydraulic fracturing varies somewhat, but is generally used for treatments injecting greater than about 300,000 pounds of proppant (136 tonnes). Pan American Petroleum applied the first massive hydraulic fracturing (also known as high-volume hydraulic fracturing) treatment in the non-communist world to a well in Stephens County, Oklahoma in 1968. The treatment injected half a million pounds of proppant into the rock formation.
  In 1973, Amoco introduced massive hydraulic fracturing to the Wattenberg Gas Field of the Denver Basin of Colorado, to recover gas from the low-permeability J Sandstone. Before massive hydraulic fracturing, the Wattenberg field was uneconomic. Injected volumes of 132,000 or more gallons, and 200,000 or more pounds of sand proppant, succeeded in recovering much greater volumes of gas than had been previously possible. In 1974, Amoco performed the first million-pound frac job, injecting more than a million pounds of proppant into the J Sand of a well in Wattenberg Field.
  The success of massive hydraulic fracturing in the Wattenberg Field of Colorado was followed in the late 1970s by its use in gas wells drilled to tight sandstones of the Mesaverde Group of the Piceance Basin of western Colorado.
  Starting in the 1970s. thousands of tight-sandstone gas wells in the US were stimulated by massive hydraulic fracturing. Examples of areas made economic by the technology include the Clinton-Medina Sandstone play in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York; the San Juan Basin in New Mexico and Colorado; numerous fields in the Green River Basin of Wyoming; and the Cotton Valley Sandstone trend of Louisiana and Texas.
caption: Tight non-shale gas plays using massive hydraulic fracturing
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