The truth falls victim to hysterical silliness, but, unfortunately, combined with the 'Captain Planet' meme of eeeevil "Big Oil", people who don't think just lap it up.
Then begins the tedium of trying to educate the hysterical and clear up other misconceptions.
“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.