Grounding Deregulation An investigation into the political consequences of hydraulic fracturing’s deregulation in 2005. On August 8th, 2005, George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act and deregulated the production technique of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking. Fracking is a supplemental step in the traditional process of drilling for oil and gas that occurs in between well completion and production. Fluid is injected down into the well at high pressure to rupture the geological formation and release any oil and gas that was trapped within its structure. Fracking allows for petroleum to be extracted from places where it would be impossible to do so otherwise. The most significant effect of its deregulation is that the scope of industrial interest was drastically expanded to encompass significantly more land area than was conceived of previously as viable for oil and gas production. In other words, what fracking does geologically, it also did economically. Fracking reconfigured the speculative logics of development and its deregulation was immediately followed by a land grab for unowned mineral rights. I wanted to understand how it could be possible to intervene within such a dramatic and rapid process of territorial development that propagates grave ecological risk along with political disenfranchisement across the American landscape. The project dealt with the complicated relation between different types of property owners, their rights, and regulatory jurisdictions in order to formulate concrete propositions for a more progressive and just pattern of industrial development. I studied the legal history of property rights in the oil and gas industry and collective institutions for the management of common-pool resources as an opportunity for land reform. The object of my study could be thought of as the political architecture of democracy, rights as they are institutionally situated and geographically distributed. My unique contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding fracking was the exposition of a new terrain for intervention, that of the regulatory device called unitization. The work presented was produced to represent the relation between an individual plot of land and international networks of speculation. Table of Contents:
1-6: The scope of North Dakota’s drilling activity and subsurface property relations 7-17: Analysis of a single unit for demonstrative purposes
Independent Masters Thesis Project Completed while attending the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2014