Extraction of oil and gas from heretofore inaccessible mineral deposits has been possible via hydraulic fracturing (fracking) since 1949. The massive carbon footprint from fracking to obtain oil and gas is generally dismissed, doubted or unknown by politicians and the public, all in service to the endgame of oil and gas combustion with its own attendant well-known but often politically dismissed climate degradation and inequities.

DEATH SPIRAL critiques the destructive legacy of the environmental and existential consequences of resource extractivism, using natural and industrial materials as both subject and medium. The purity and innocence of sand and dirt are turned sinister in their facilitating pollution, as the painting captures the violent tension between human industry and the natural world’s fragile endurance.

The following “FRAC FACTS” provide a comprehensive survey of the extent of environmental, economic, health and social impacts from fracking and how the abundance of fracked gas enables substantial environmental damage from downstream energy processes.

• frac sand acquisition from quarries and mines, separation of the silica from impurities and warehousing the material in preparation for shipping.

• trains to transport millions of tons of sand to transload sites hundreds to thousands of miles away.

• fleets of diesel tri-axle and semi-trucks used to transport millions of tons of frac sand, millions of gallons of water and tanks of chemicals, many of them toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”, to each drill site.

• massive diesel rigs drill thousands of feet vertically, then drill numerous horizontal wells thousands of feet into the dense black shale that holds gas and oil. Cement is also pumped into the wells to seal the well casing and an explosive device is inserted into the well to perforate each well casing.

• dozens of diesel pump rigs connected by modular manifolds blast the sand/water/chemical slurry into each well under enormous pressure, providing minute voids in the shale that are wedged open with the frac sand proppant.

• the millions of gallons of water each well uses contain chemicals that serve to dissolve minerals, reduce friction and prevent corrosion. The EPA’s Safe Water Drinking Act requires drillers to list the chemicals they use, but the Haliburton Loophole allows chemicals that drillers consider proprietary for competitive advantage to be exempt from disclosure, many of which are carcinogenic and linked to disease, infertility and higher mortality rates, allowing drillers to hide the true composition of their chemicals behind the Loophole.

• a Colorado law prohibits PFAS chemicals from drilling and other processes, as some 1,600 toxic chemicals at microscopic levels are suspected of migrating through underground pathways of cracks and leaks to groundwater. Colorado law requires drilling and energy services companies to disclose these substances and any spill releases, but less than half do. Weld County alone has over 1,100 wells.

• this toxic and radioactive produced and flowback water laced with PFAS chemicals is pumped out of the wells with the sand left in the voids as proppant to provide a path for pumping gas and oil to the surface.

• this produced water must be disposed of by blasting it underground into abandoned wells (suspected of causing earthquakes in certain areas and polluting groundwater,) trucking it to man-made ponds where the toxins in the water evaporate, and in some cases, is recycled or reused in additional wells.

• produced water pumped into these abandoned oil wells has been found leaking to the surface from internal pressure.

• energy services companies are desperate to dispose of the increasing accumulation of produced water. Ohio is one state that has accepted these radioactive fluids to use as dust suppressants and deicer on its roads.

• with the discovery of significant amounts of lithium in Pennsylvania produced water, the acceleration of fracking has one less reason to be scaled back.

• a massive network of underground pipelines and pumping stations create attendant air pollution from construction and operation.an entire industry has been created to build ships to transport liquified natural gas (LNG) worldwide, contributing to the huge amounts of ocean and energy pollution.

• L.N.G. conversion plants that require trucks and rail to transport this highly explosive substance through local communities.

• methane flaring at well pads.

• each well requires millions gallons of water to be trucked to well pads. Water is the most threatened liquid world-wide. Fracking’s reliance on extraordinary amounts of water adds to the catastrophic imbalance between water supply and demand.

• economically accessible quality sand is the most threatened solid material in the world.

• extreme degradation of local roads from 24/7 truck fleets affects community safety and stresses municipal budgets.

• the negative health effects of fracking have been verified through extensive studies, especially revealed, for example, by the significant differences between the health outcomes of Pennsylvania residents living and working in or near fracking sites, compared to those residing in New York State, where fracking is banned.

• despite the onerous but generally disregarded pollution and environmental degradation from this process repeated thousands of times across the country, fracking is considered a boon to local employment and economies and a windfall from mineral rights royalties to landowners, blinding these communities to the dangers.

• a well’s life cycle exhausts economically available gas over a short time, with the attendant expenses of well decommissioning and land reclamation, often delayed or avoided; newer extraction methods are refracking (restimulating) existing wells to capture some of this remaining gas, requiring additional massive amounts of chemicals, water and even finer-grain frac sand.

• as much as 90% of the volume of a well’s fractured network remains unpropped.

• wells are producing from only 10% of the fracture network they initially created.

• fracking has been wildly unprofitable, its economics dependent on oil and gas market prices, government subsidies, fees and speculation. Capital costs are high. In their second year of operation, the average oil and gas output from a fracked well drops off between 60 and 80 percent. Companies then need to lease more land and drill more wells.

• between 2010 and 2020, shale drilling lost $300 billion.

• the energy return on investment (EROI—the energy spent on extracting, processing and distributing any energy) of fracking is among the lowest of any technology: fracking EROI 2-3; oil sands EROI 3-5; conventional oil drilling up to EROI 30; wind power EROI 30-50; hydroelectric and nuclear EROI 30-100.

• as an indicator of the scale of fracking, between 2005 and 2015 alone, 137,000 fracking wells were drilled in the US, with between 2 million and 39 million gallons of water per well, often drilled in states already experiencing water distress (Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania among them.)

• in 2014 alone, fracking produced 14 billion gallons of wastewater and 5.3 billion pounds of methane.

• an example of downstream energy processes now made available from fracking is the ethane cracker in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, which utilizes ethane, a by-product of fracked gas, to make ethylene, a building block for plastic pellets. A reported 17.9 billion pounds of air pollutant emissions were released from this plant between January 2020 and July 2024, and nearly 400 million pounds of unexpected air pollutant emissions. The list of dangerous chemicals in these emissions is long, including benzine, ammonia, methane, naphthalene and styrene, contributing to the pollution and negative health outcomes in already overburdened environmental justice communities. This process pushes more plastic into the environment and its attendant pollution.

• LNG plants, ethane crackers and data center siting shadow fracked gas development, contribute additional carbon footprints and further strain water resources. They have caused significant resistance from communities contiguous to those sites over concerns of air and water pollution, noise, traffic congestion, water availability, property values and spills. Some localities allow fracking wells to be drilled 500 feet from schools, regulations that are also being opposed as being too dangerously close to such facilities.

• the EPA estimates that there are approximately 4 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the US, with an excess of 117,000 orphaned wells, meaning they are uncapped, unproductive and with no party responsible for them. Thousands of non-producing fracking wells will only add to this catastrophe.

• thousands of feet below the Marcellus formation (itself thousands of feet below the surface) lies Utica shale, even richer in oil and gas deposits than Marcellus. Technology already exists to extract these resources from such depths, guaranteeing the indefinite continuation of fracking.

• shale gas and oil are also extracted from other formations nationally, including the Permian, Haynesville/Bossier and Mesaverde/Niobrara, as well as internationally.