Blowout

Fracking is the process of injecting liquid at a high pressure into rock formations to open existing fissures in the rock, with the intent of extracting oil or natural gas. Maddow traces the story of fracking from its origins, enabled by the efforts of George Mitchell, to its renaissance in Oklahoma. Maddow places special emphasis on fracking as an “ultrahazardous activity” with dire environmental impacts in Chapter 12.

Gazprom is the largest state-owned energy company in Russia, its largest producer and industry leader. When Gazprom struggled to produce for Russia and Europe in 2011, ExxonMobil stepped in and helped Russia’s oil and gas reputation by creating a megadeal with another state-owned company, Rosneft. Gazprom is portrayed in Blowout as a cog in Putin’s tight hold on Big Oil and Gas in Russia.

This occurs when a computer system is exploited and taken over to fulfil an illicit purpose. In Blowout Rachel Maddow most notably chronicles the hacking done by Guccifer, or Marcel Lehel Lazar, a Romanian hacker who committed major cybersecurity breaches in the United States and Romania. These breaches included American celebrities and politicians, such as Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton. Guccifer is portrayed as a disruptor who revels in chaos rather than domination. Maddow describes Guccifer’s actions in the following way: “stealing the materials and then making a public spectacle of their display […] wasn’t just mischievous and impressive; it was properly destructive” (211).

Lukoil is a state-owned Russian energy company. Maddow begins the book by describing the grand opening of Lukoil’s first gas station in America. Vladimir Putin attended the event. Lukoil, along with Rosneft, is repeatedly mentioned as a pillar of Russian oil and gas.

Natural gas is one of the main energy sources in the world, making up roughly 20% of the world’s primary energy. Maddow explains how a natural gas crisis in the late 1970s eventually led to a series of experiments in producing and extracting more natural gas, which eventually led to the environmentally dubious practice of fracking.

These human-induced earthquakes began in 2009 and still occur sporadically to this day. Studies have linked these earthquakes to oil extraction in the region, more specifically to the wastewater disposal involved in fracking. Maddow tells the story of these earthquakes from the perspectives of Austin Holland, a seismologist who tried to understand the nature of the phenomenon, and oilmen such as Harold Hamm, who worked to shut down the notion that fracking and the earthquakes were somehow linked.

Rosneft is another one of Russia’s state-owned oil companies; it is one of the largest in the world. Rosneft’s success is largely due to the corrupt acquisition of Yukos, a private company that was swallowed up by Putin and Igor Sechin after its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned for political reasons. Rosneft and ExxonMobil’s deal in 2011 was one of the biggest energy company deals in history. In 2018, however, ExxonMobil withdrew from the deal. Maddow describes Rosneft’s rise as reverse privatization, as Putin took down a legitimate private company and repurposed it for Russia’s political and economic interests.

In the context of the global oil and gas industry, sanctions are essentially financial restrictions placed on big companies or governments. Maddow includes various examples of economic sanctions, including those imposed by the United States and the European Union against Russia after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea. These sanctions froze the assets of several men, including Putin’s most trusted advisors, such as Igor Sechin.

This is water used in fracking that includes chemical additives. Using slickwater increases the speed of drilling, thereby making this method of gas extraction more effective. In Chapter 2 Maddow describes slickwatered fracking, as well as a drilling method known as horizontal drilling, as a “genie out of the bottle” (27).

This is an acronym for “technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material,” a byproduct of fracking that is highly environmentally hazardous. TENORM occurs as a result of oil and gas waste, and it can pose serious health risks to anyone exposed to it. Maddow details how TENORM was illegally disposed near Indian reservations and empty buildings in North Dakota to shed light on the oil industry’s environmental indifference.