Nearly half of the oil produced in the United States came as a result of hydraulic fracturing last year, the U.S. Department of Energy said. The department’s U.S. Energy Information Administration said hydraulic fracturing of about 23,000 wells in the country in 2000 yielded about 102,000 barrels of oil per day, which at the time was less than 2 percent of the total output. “Even though hydraulic fracturing has been in use for more than six decades, it has only recently been used to produce a significant portion of crude oil in the United States,” EIA said in a report. According to data from the administration and its industry counterparts, the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of around […]