Asking "is fracking successful" is like asking "is CSG...

Asking "is fracking successful" is like asking "is CSG successful." It's an entire industry with a full spectrum of financial outcomes from success to failure.

Like CSG it's obviously successful under suitable conditions, but also like CSG people got carried away and torched a lot of money by assuming too much. That's not the fault of fracking, it's the fault of human bias and herd instinct in making investment decisions.

Shale is almost always marginal and extremely capital intensive, which combine to make it risky. It works in sweet spots and then it's very profitable from the huge scale of it, but once the sweet spots are taken people start throwing money at lesser quality plays without properly derisking them. They justify it on usually overly optimistic assumptions around efficiency and technology improvements which aren't met - the improvement in the US shale industry has been truly spectacular, but still not enough to compensate for poor rock properties, particularly since these improvements apply equally to the sweet spots so the poorer plays are still at a disadvantage.

So fracking is not the problem. It's just an engineering technology. Applying capital in an efficient and market-appropriate way is the problem, and that's not specific to fracking. It's an issue as old as economics.