[Marcella]

“The contention seemed to be that somehow ‘fracked’ oil was more volatile (I recall they used the term “explosive”) than ‘unfracked’ oil.”

Some people’s brains are hopeless. Oil is oil and gas is gas. In these land areas, both oil and gas are stuck in shale rock. Drilling into the shale rock, and drilling horizontal both ways at the bottom of the well that is in the shale, and shattering the shale using carbon dioxide explosions, releases the oil that is oil and the gas that is gas. That is a simple explanation and is how it was explained to me by the engineer who is at those wells most of the time.

When the well is completed, either trucks carry out the oil from the well head, or large containers are constructed at the well site are filled and trucks get it from there, or according to the locations, pipe can be laid to get it to the refinery and that’s where the trucks are going, too. It’s plain oil and plain gas that came out of rock.

[Smokin' Joe]

Marcella, I have been working as a geologist in the oil patch for 35+ years now, and while Carbon Dioxide can be used to frac a well, more often it is done using high pressure fluid (mostly water) to crack the rock, and sand or ceramic pellets as proppants to hold those fractures open. Carbon Dioxide is a pretty stable oxide of carbon, and doesn't explode downhole. As a gas, it is compressible and will expand rapidly once the rock breaks, but that isn't the same as a chemical explosion where the initial constituents are altered to something else, more like when a steam pipe bursts.

It’s plain oil and plain gas that came out of rock.

Precisely, fracking just makes the extraction more efficient.