Fracking
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40 free Fracking trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few technologies have changed the energy map as quickly as fracking. In little more than a decade it turned the United States from a worried importer into one of the world's biggest oil and gas producers, and it started arguments about water, earthquakes and climate that are still running. This quiz covers the whole story: how a well is fracked, what goes into the fluid, where the first experiments happened, the rock formations behind the boom, and the companies, campaigners and politicians who fought over it on both sides of the Atlantic. It is written for students, energy watchers and anyone who has heard the word in the news and wants to test what they really know. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few surprising facts.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Project Gasbuggy, a 1967 US government test in New Mexico, tried to shatter gas-bearing rock using what?
A nuclear bomb
A nuclear bomb of 29 kilotons was detonated 4,227 feet underground as part of Operation Plowshare, a program seeking peaceful uses for atomic explosions.
Q 02Which 2010 documentary by Josh Fox made fracking a national issue with scenes of tap water set alight?
Gasland
Gasland was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and became a rallying point for the anti-fracking movement.
Q 03Cheap natural gas from fracking sped the decline of which fuel, long the leading source of US electricity?
Coal
Coal produced 51% of US electricity in 2001 but about 16% by 2023, as cheaper gas and renewables pushed plants to close.
Q 04Which US state suffered a magnitude 5.8 earthquake near Pawnee in 2016, amid a surge tied to its oil industry?
Oklahoma
Oklahoma's Pawnee earthquake of September 2016 was the strongest ever recorded in the state, five years after another damaging quake struck near the town of Prague.
Q 05The Bakken formation, named after a local farmer, fueled a fracking-driven oil boom centered on which US state?
North Dakota
North Dakota farmer Henry Bakken owned the land where drillers first found the rock, which lies entirely underground with no outcrop at the surface.
Q 06Which actor co-wrote and starred in Promised Land, a 2012 drama about a gas company buying rural drilling rights?
Matt Damon
Matt Damon wrote the screenplay with co-star John Krasinski and was set to direct before Gus Van Sant took over.
Q 07The word fracking, now standard in news headlines, is short for which two-word engineering term?
Hydraulic fracturing
Hydraulic fracturing is still the name the oil industry tends to use, sometimes clipped to fracing with no k, while fracking dominates in popular media.
Q 08Besides water, which material makes up most of a typical fracking fluid, wedging the cracks in the rock open?
Sand
Sand makes up about 9.5% of a typical mix; when the pumps stop, the grains stay behind and hold the cracks open so oil and gas can flow.
Q 09Which European country outlawed fracking in 2011, a ban its Constitutional Council upheld two years later?
France
France passed the ban after public pressure, citing the precautionary principle; a US-based company, Schuepbach Energy, challenged it and lost.
Q 10Which British prime minister briefly lifted England's fracking moratorium in 2022, before a successor restored it?
Liz Truss
Liz Truss lifted the moratorium during the shortest premiership in British history; Rishi Sunak reinstated it in October 2022.
Q 11Which Texas oilman is often called the father of fracking for unlocking natural gas from the Barnett Shale?
George Mitchell
George Mitchell, the son of a Greek goat herder, spent the 1980s and 1990s testing techniques before one finally made shale gas pay.
Q 12The 2005 law exempting fracking from federal injection rules is nicknamed after which oilfield services company?
Halliburton
Halliburton, once run by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, also carried out the first commercial fracking jobs back in 1949.
Q 13The very first fracking experiment took place in 1947 at the Hugoton gas field in which US state?
Kansas
Kansas hosted the trial in Grant County, at a limestone gas well 2,400 feet deep, and it flopped: the well's output barely changed.
Q 21Fracking made the US a major oil exporter, but dramatically increased leaks of which potent greenhouse gas?
Methane
Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas, and some evidence suggests the leaks may cancel out the climate benefit of burning gas instead of other fossil fuels.
Q 22What is the oil industry's name for the solid grains in fracking fluid that keep new cracks from closing?
Proppant
Proppant can be tough ceramic beads or bauxite in the deepest wells, where the pressure would crush weaker grains.
Q 23What do drillers call the injected fracking fluid that returns to the surface when a new well is commissioned?
Flowback
Flowback comes up over about a week, mixed with oil, gas and brine, and it is only a portion of the fluid that was pumped down.
Q 14The first fracking test in 1947 pumped in which everyday fuel, thickened into a gel much like napalm?
Gasoline
Gasoline was the base of that first batch: 1,000 gallons of it, gelled into what was essentially napalm, were pumped down the well.
Q 15Which shale formation under Pennsylvania and West Virginia became the largest source of natural gas in the US?
Marcellus
Marcellus shale runs beneath much of Appalachia, reaching into southeast Ohio, and fracking turned it into the country's biggest gas producer.
Q 16Which US state, with no known frackable gas of its own, became the first to ban fracking by law in 2012?
Vermont
Vermont's legislature voted 103–36 for the ban, a preventative step that Governor Peter Shumlin signed into law in May 2012.
Q 17Which US state banned high-volume fracking in 2014, citing health risks, while neighboring Pennsylvania kept drilling?
New York
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the statewide ban in December 2014, after a state review of the potential public health effects.
Q 18Two small earthquakes in 2011 halted Britain's first big fracking job at Preese Hall, near which seaside resort?
Blackpool
Blackpool sits on the Lancashire coast, where one tremor reached magnitude 2.3 and deformed the well; England imposed a moratorium on fracking in 2019.
Q 19Fracking revived which basin under West Texas and New Mexico, making it the highest-producing US oil field?
Permian
The Permian Basin was thought to have peaked in the early 1970s, until fracking and other new drilling technology sent its output soaring again.
Q 20A 2005 energy law exempted fracking from the underground injection rules of which US environmental statute?
Safe Drinking Water Act
Safe Drinking Water Act rules still bite in one case: the exemption does not cover fracking fluids that contain diesel fuels.
Q 24Most earthquakes tied to America's oil and gas boom are linked to which practice, rather than to fracking itself?
Wastewater disposal
Wastewater disposal pumps salty waste fluid deep underground for good, and the added pressure can make long-quiet faults slip.
Q 25Shale gas needs fracking because shale is very low in which rock property, measured in millidarcies?
Permeability
Permeability describes how easily fluid moves through rock; below about 0.1 millidarcy a rock counts as impermeable, so its gas stays locked in until cracks are made.
Q 26Which thickener, made from a bean grown mainly in India, is added to fracking fluid to help it gel?
Guar gum
Guar gum is the same additive that keeps ice cream smooth, and India produces nearly 80% of the world's supply of the bean.
Q 27Which Avengers actor, dubbed anti-fracking's first famous face, founded the group Water Defense in 2010?
Mark Ruffalo
Mark Ruffalo took up the cause in 2008, when gas companies were eyeing his family's land in the town of Callicoon.
Q 28Oil, gas and fracking in Texas are regulated by which misleadingly named state agency, founded in 1891?
Railroad Commission
Railroad Commission is a name that outlived its job: the agency stopped regulating railroads in 2005 but still oversees the state's oil and gas wells.
Q 29In 2014, which oil exporter urged OPEC toward higher output and lower prices to squeeze high-cost US shale?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia hoped cheap crude would erode shale's profits; oil sank below $30 a barrel by January 2016, yet shale survived and sapped the cartel's market power.
Q 30The Barnett Shale, America's most productive shale gas field through the 2000s, lies beneath which Texas city?
Fort Worth
Fort Worth sits right on top of the field, so wells went into urban areas, and some local governments looked at drilling beneath public parks.