Fracking, Long a North American Energy Phenomenon, Goes Global

Bag by bag—in what Ron Gusek calls giant “super sacks”—Liberty Energy Inc. loaded 45 million pounds of sand in late 2024 from a California port and sent it across the Pacific. The cargo was bound for Australia’s remote Beetaloo Basin, where beneath red dirt sits a hard-to-reach reservoir of natural gas roughly the size of Belgium. When the sand landed in the outback, Liberty planned to mix it with high-pressure fluids and inject it underground to release natural gas in a process commonly known as fracking. It’s a uniquely American invention that’s quickly becoming a major US export, thanks to ...