Hydraulic Fracturing

Our experience with hydraulic fracturing runs deep.

While hydraulic fracturing (also known as “fracing” or “fracking”) has been used on more than one million oil and gas wells since the late 1940s, the rise in economic importance of massive shale deposits across the United States has brought the process to the forefront of a resurgent energy industry – and to the attention of opponents of oil and gas development.

Haynes Boone’s Energy Practice routinely counsels both U.S.-based and global upstream energy companies who engage in the day-to-day work of finding and extracting oil and gas using fracing. We have a thorough and longstanding knowledge of the transactional, financial, environmental, tax, and regulatory issues surrounding the well completion operation technology used in the production of oil and gas.

Our Energy Litigation team also has significant experience from helping our clients providing early risk assessments to avoid litigation to successfully arguing in appellate courts – and everything in between.

Our clients include some of the largest public energy corporations, as well as independent producers, individuals, operators, non-operators, buyers and sellers of oil and gas properties, lenders and borrowers, and oilfield service companies of every kind. Many of our clients are involved in the domestic resource plays and shale plays of Eagle Ford, Barnett, Haynesville, Wolfberry, Marcellus, Utica, Niobrara, Woodford and Bakken/Three Forks.

Litigation alleging harm from fracing or related activities has been on the increase in a number of states in the past few years, and especially in more populated areas near the Barnett and Marcellus shale plays. Our lawyers have been at the forefront of defending energy companies in these cases, including a case which was falsely reported by the plaintiffs and many media outlets as the “first fracing trial” in the United States (at trial, plaintiffs actually complained about emissions from condensate storage tanks, not hydraulic fracturing).