A small time criminal, Ron, has killed the boss of his girlfriend and they are escaping from the police. After killing a gas station attendant, Ron drives to an old manor in the middle of nowhere where Andrew, an agoraphobic, lives, in order to exchange their car. When he notes that Andrew is a wealthy man, Ron decides to get money from Andrew to travel to Thailand. Andrew notices that Dale resembles his fiancée, Gabrielle, who left him six months ago. He proposes that Dale dye her hair and go to the bank with two cheques of $20,000.00 pretending that she is Gabrielle. But things do not go according to plan.

It is happening all across America-rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground-a hydraulic drilling process called "fracking"-and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.

In the Sahara desert, a sandstorm batters a deserted drilling station. Thomas "Jack" Jackman a security patrolman, battles through the high winds to find out why all contact with the station has been lost. Originally built for gas exploration, and then abandoned, the site had recently been taken over by a multi-national research team intent on drilling deeper into the earth's crust than ever before.