West Texas shale country supplies the cast for this VPRO Backlight portrait of the fracking boom: geologists Dan Steward, Kent Bowker, and Nick Steinsberger, who worked out in the late 1990s how to pull gas from rock long dismissed as worthless, plus energy historian Daniel Yergin and oil-company executives like Tommy Taylor of Fasken Oil and Doug Shanda of Cheniere Energy. The film traces how injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into shale formations turned a fringe technique into a third of American oil and gas production, dropping crude from around $100 to under $50 a barrel and making the country an energy exporter rather than an importer. Shot after Trump's election, which Texas producers greeted as vindication, the film follows the excitement over the Wolf Camp Shale Field's estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves alongside the industry's own reckoning with what fracking does to water supplies and seismic activity. It stays close to the people who built the boom rather than their critics, letting their optimism carry most of the argument.