The United States is a country that has received many blessings, and once upon a time you could assume that Americans would come together to take advantage of them. But you can no longer make that assumption. The country is more divided and more clogged by special interests. Now we groan to absorb even the most wondrous gifts.

A few years ago, a business genius named George P. Mitchell helped offer such a gift. As Daniel Yergin writes in “The Quest,” his gripping history of energy innovation, Mitchell fought through waves of skepticism and opposition to extract natural gas from shale. The method he and his team used to release the trapped gas, called fracking, has paid off in the most immense way. In 2000, shale gas represented just 1 percent of American natural gas supplies. Today, it is 30 percent and rising.

John Rowe, the chief executive of the utility Exelon, which derives almost all its power from nuclear plants, says that shale gas is one of the most important energy revolutions of his lifetime. It’s a cliché word, Yergin told me, but the fracking innovation is game-changing. It transforms the energy marketplace.

The U.S. now seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. This cleaner, cheaper energy source is already replacing dirtier coal-fired plants. It could serve as the ideal bridge, Amy Jaffe of Rice University says, until renewable sources like wind and solar mature.

Already shale gas has produced more than half a million new jobs, not only in traditional areas like Texas but also in economically wounded places like western Pennsylvania and, soon, Ohio. If current trends continue, there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs to come.

Chemical companies rely heavily on natural gas, and the abundance of this new source has induced companies like Dow Chemical to invest in the U.S. rather than abroad. The French company Vallourec is building a $650 million plant in Youngstown, Ohio, to make steel tubes for the wells. States like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York will reap billions in additional revenue. Consumers also benefit. Today, natural gas prices are less than half of what they were three years ago, lowering electricity prices. Meanwhile, America is less reliant on foreign suppliers.

All of this is tremendously good news, but, of course, nothing is that simple. The U.S. is polarized between “drill, baby, drill” conservatives, who seem suspicious of most regulation, and some environmentalists, who seem to regard fossil fuels as morally corrupt and imagine we can switch to wind and solar overnight.

The shale gas revolution challenges the coal industry, renders new nuclear plants uneconomic and changes the economics for the renewable energy companies, which are now much further from viability. So forces have gathered against shale gas, with predictable results.

The clashes between the industry and the environmentalists are now becoming brutal and totalistic, dehumanizing each side. Not-in-my-backyard activists are organizing to prevent exploration. Environmentalists and their publicists wax apocalyptic.

Like every energy source, fracking has its dangers. The process involves injecting large amounts of water and chemicals deep underground. If done right, this should not contaminate freshwater supplies, but rogue companies have screwed up and there have been instances of contamination.

This post by David Brooks originally appeared on the New York Times Opinion Pages.

Not that word.

“Fracking has become almost a dirty word,” said Brian McDermott, spokesman for Gregory FCA Communications, an Ardmore public relations firm that has measured popular sentiments associated with various resource-extraction terms. It found fracking lacking, scoring even lower in positives than strip-mining.

Fracking, of course, is short for hydraulic fracturing, the controversial process for recovering natural gas. The word – harsh, threatening, and vaguely profane – has become a linguistic weapon in the shale-gas culture wars.
The fracas over fracturing will be on full display in Philadelphia this week as the Marcellus Shale Coalition holds a two-day conference to promote the industry. Anti-drilling activists plan a protest Wednesday outside the Convention Center, providing a stage for some censor-defying chants employing the new F-word.

The oil and gas industry is irked about what it calls mischaracterizations of fracking, not the least of which is how the word is spelled. In the trade press, it is frac.

But as the shale-gas boom took off, and the mainstream media took interest, the K got appended to frac to reduce the chance of mispronunciation. Otherwise, fracing might look as though it rhymes with racing.

The new spelling has an unfortunate resemblance to one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words, providing anti-drilling activists with a bounty of double entendres.

“I take exception to the fact that drilling opponents have taken to using frack as euphemism for a curse word I can’t print in this family newsletter,” wrote Will Brackett, managing editor of the Powell Shale Digest, a trade weekly based in Fort Worth, Texas.

Brackett now inserts an apostrophe into the noun – frac’ing – to avoid the offensive “k.” But his adaptation has failed to win widespread acceptance.

The gas-drilling frack should not be confused with the made-for-TV frak, a faux curse coined by the writers of the science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica long before hydraulic fracturing moved into the mainstream. The Battlestar producers wanted a four-letter word, so they deliberately spelled the word with only a K.

The ambiguity of frack has some unintended consequences, including creating new parental challenges. One Mount Airy mother whose young son encountered a neighbor’s anti-drilling sign struggled about when was the right age to talk to her child about the fracks of life.

The industry was pretty much caught flat-footed by the controversy, and its message of clean-burning, job-creating, domestically produced natural gas has gotten blown off course.

Drillers have been fracturing wells for decades to release trapped oil and gas, and nobody much cared, even back in the days when operators pumped rock formations with napalm to stimulate the flow of fossil fuels. Those wells were really fracked.

In its modern incarnation, fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of water, sand, and chemicals into a shale seam, which causes the rock to shatter. The process is conducted after the well bore is drilled and lined with concrete and steel to prevent communication between the deep gas-bearing rock and shallow freshwater aquifers.

Josh Fox, the director of the documentary Gasland that attributes “fracking” as the source of all gas-drilling evils, including some unrelated to fracturing, says his broader use of the term is justified because there would be no shale-gas development without hydraulic fracturing.

Many activists, headline writers, and the public now use the word fracking to describe all aspects of gas production, not just fracturing.

The industry’s insistence that there are no documented cases in which fracturing has caused groundwater contamination seems disingenuous to a public that is aware of cases in which gas-drilling caused pollution. Whether it was a bad frack job or bad cement work that allowed methane to leak into drinking water is irrelevant. In the public’s mind, it’s all fracking now.

Greg Matusky, the president of the Gregory FCA public relations firm, has a solution: Stop using the word.
Matusky’s firm, using a Nielsen algorithm, has studied the use of the word fracking in traditional and online media against other terms used in natural-resource extraction. By the context in which words are used, Matusky can draw relative conclusions about positive and negative associations.

Natural gas drilling and horizontal drilling scored positively. Hydraulic fracturing scored much better than fracking. About the only terms worse than fracking were longwall mining, offshore drilling, and gulf drilling.

“A better, more positive term is warranted,” Matusky wrote in a blog post in February. “The industry needs to identify negatively charged words and replace them with positive language.”

The negative consequences of fracking have taken on near-mythic proportions. After the recent earthquake in Virginia, some activists blamed hydraulic fracturing, though no drilling was taking place near the epicenter.
“It also caused the Great Depression, the Black Plague, the October Revolution, and the breakup of the Beatles,” responded Chris Tucker of Energy in Depth, an oil and gas industry group based in Washington.

Source: Philly.com

The production of economical natural gas from shales during the next ten years is being attributed to advances in technology such as horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing stimulation (called ‘frac’). The press release references a slowdown in drilling “except for the prolific Haynesville Shale”.

- C. Keddy