Sharon Wilson and Justin Mikulka

Sharon Wilson had a ringside seat to the beginning of the fracking boom from her farm in Wise County Texas where in 1997 George Mitchell successfully married horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to produce oil and gas from shale. Her air turned brown and her water black and she began documenting the harm from fracking. In 2014 she became the first non-regulatory, non-industry person to get certified as an optical gas imaging thermographer. // Justin manages communications for Oilfield Witness. For the past decade Justin has researched and written about the U.S. shale oil and gas industry. In 2019, he started highlighting the industry’s issues with methane emissions and flaring. He has written about the ongoing issues of abandoned wells in the U.S. and the oil industry’s large unfunded environmental liabilities related to these abandoned wells.