0
There's more to learn about oil and gas development in Texas and how women use photography to understand impacts on the land.
Click on a pushpin to continue your story.
To learn more about fracking and its ecological impacts, take a visit to the Great Plains and see about polices in North Dakota.
Or, replay the game and make some different choices to see how you might be affected by fracking.
Texas is also a hub for oil and gas transportation globally, such as in the Houston Ship Channel. The industry provides for an estimated 2.2 million jobs across industries in the state in 2021, according to the Texas Oil and Gas Association.
There are smaller oil and gas pockets found across the state. The American Oil and Gas Historical Society reports the first well in Texas was drilled in 1866.
Tomball drilling began in the 1930s.
There are five major oil and gas formations in Texas.
Barnett Shale is in the northeast portion of the state and includes the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth.
Eagle Ford Shale covers nearly 400 miles of the state beginning near the Mexico border and extending to the Dallas suburbs.
Granite Wash can be found along the Texas panhandle.
Haynesville/Bossier Shale is located along the Texas/Lousiana border.
And the Permian Basin runs about 300 miles along the Texas/New Mexico border.
From November 2021 to October 2022, the Railroad Commission of Texas reports wells produced 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil and 11.2 trillion cubic feet of total gas.
Where would you like to go in Texas?
Click on a pushpin to start your story.
In 1935, the town of Tomball reached an agreement with the Humble Oil and Refining Company. The company
was allowed to drill 25 wells in
Source: Lessie Upchurch, Welcome
to Tomball: A History of Tomball
(Austin, Texas, 2005) University of
North Texas Libraries, The Portal
to Texas History
The Barnett Shale Play is a natural gas field in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Production peaked in 2012 at over 2,100 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, and dropped to around 1,100 billion cubic feet a day by 2018, according to the University of Texas.
As the natural gas development and extraction increased, so did earthquakes in the region.
Earthquake activity in Texas can in some cases be tied to natural teutonic activity on faults in the state. But as early as 1925 scienties tied oil and gas exploration to an uptick in temblors.
A University of Texas study found that 58% of earthquakes between 1975 and 2015 could "certainly" or "probably" be tied to oil and gas industry.
That includes many of the earthquakes happening around Dallas.
Jeanine Michna-Bales is an artist and activist based in Dallas.
Her project Terra Fractura is a photographic survey of what she has dubbed "manmade" earthquakes in the Dallas area.
Click here to continue.
Welcome to the Houston Ship Channel
Photographer Victoria Sambunaris is based in New York's Hudson River Valley.
Her project is called Taxonomy of a Landscape
.
What is the Houston Ship Channel?