Don't Frack With Me

For big business, a snappy, easy-to-remember slogan or catchphrase is usually a major plus: Everything goes better with Coke. Just do it. The fabric of our lives.

The shale gas industry that has become a major factor in the world energy picture certainly has a well-known catchphrase. But it’s one that industry marketing people don’t like at all.

Around the country, drilling opponents have seized on the word “frack” — short for hydraulic fracturing, the process of blasting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals into a well hole to release trapped natural gas — and have used it so many ways that the word is becoming part of the lexicon of a large segment of the U.S. population. Though not in a driller-friendly manner.

It’s a phenomenon that may be causing the industry more grief than all of the detailed complaints of health dangers and environmental impacts combined. A person doesn’t need to understand how much noise and pollution will be caused by drilling a gas well in an urban area or what specific toxic soup is used to fracture a shale well in order to pick up the meaning of a yard sign that reads “Not in my fracking back yard!” or “I’ve been fracked over!” or “Don’t frack with me!”

And the word has gone far beyond yard signs or posters at protests. These days there are nationally marketed “no frack” temporary tattoos, t-shirts, hats, billboards, bumper stickers, and even a low-budget short zombie-environmental film called Frac Attack: Dawn of the Watershed. There is fire behind all the bad PR smoke, to be sure. Concerns about the toxic effects of fracking and other parts of the gas production process have prompted the EPA to put into place a new rule that will compel drillers to utilize “green completions” — technologies that capture emissions — beginning in 2015. The EPA has also proposed a rule that would require gas drillers to list the chemicals (other than proprietary ones) used in fracking on public and Indian lands — a practice already followed voluntarily by some drillers. The state of New York, part of the enormous Marcellus Shale play, has had a ban on natural gas drilling in place for several years while studying whether drilling would threaten that state’s huge groundwater resources. Earlier this month, Vermont became the first state to institute a statewide ban on fracking. Vermont is not thought to have many shale gas reserves, making the ban mostly symbolic, but activists hope it will embolden other more shale-rich states to do the same.

The industry, plagued lately by extremely low prices for natural gas and, more recently, high levels of outrage over questionable billions in profits being taken by Chesapeake Energy founder Aubrey McClendon, is now trying to figure out how to back away from a word that has become a nightmare for them.

“I don’t think anti-drilling advocates could have picked a better word for people to grasp onto for this issue,” said Deborah Rogers, a former member of the Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas who lives in Westworth Village and has a business making goat cheese. Rogers has been one of the most eloquent and far-seeing of drilling opponents ever since some of her animals died in 2009 after being exposed to toxic gases released during flaring from a nearby drilling operation.

“Frack” is so close to that other F- word, Rogers said, “that it’s made it a simple exercise for people to flip it right back at the industry.”

“As soon as you hear the word ‘frack,’ ” said Jane Lynn, a drilling activist from Arlington, “you think of cancer, poisoned water, ruining the environment. And the gas companies brought it on themselves because they misrepresented what drilling in urban neighborhoods was going to actually mean to those of us living in those neighborhoods.”

Drilling industry concerns over the increasing negative power of the word “frack” first surfaced at an industry conference last year. One of the folks at the two-day event, called the Media and Stakeholders Relations Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative, was Sharon Wilson, an anti-gas drilling blogger and organizer for Earthworks’ Oil and Gas Accountability Project.

“The first time it came up was when a woman at one of the seminars said that everywhere she went, people were talking about fracking,” Wilson said. “And Michael Kehs” — Chesapeake Energy’s vice president of strategic affairs and public relations — “said the industry should discourage the use of the word ‘fracking.’ He said he preferred to use the word ‘drilling’ because there is a constituency for drilling while there is not one for fracking.”

Another speaker, Wilson recalled, said that “fracking is an obscene term and sounds scary. People are using the word ‘fracking’ to scare people, and we have to overcome that scare tactic.”

Wilson said that Greg Matusky, president of the public relations firm Gregory FCA of Ardmore, Pa., stated that in terms of language sentiment, “fracking ranked lower than strip mining,” showing it was a divisive term that shouldn’t be used by industry.

Chesapeake spokespersons didn’t return Fort Worth Weekly’s calls to discuss the issue. Devon Energy’s spokesman Chip Minty said he had no opinion on whether the word had negative connotations.

Ed Ireland, executive director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry-supported group, did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

Tim Ruggiero is a former resident of Decatur who moved out of the Barnett Shale in January, two years after Aruba Petroleum drilled a gas well on his property — he didn’t own the mineral rights — and his children began to get sick from the emissions.

“The gas companies think they’re suffering from a public perception problem,” Ruggiero said. “What they’re really suffering from is a credibility problem. You can only catch someone in so many lies and distortions of the truth before you don’t believe anything they say. So they brought the frack attack on themselves.”

The slogans can be as simple as a circle with a red line over the word frack. Or they can take off on movies like Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver comment, as in, “Are you fracking with me?” The t-shirts and posters are available in national catalogs and all over the internet.

In North Texas, there’s “no question we were fracked,” said Calvin Tillman, the former mayor of DISH, Texas, whose town was so crisscrossed with pipelines and compressor stations that he finally sold his home at a loss and moved away so that his family could begin to recover from the chronic nosebleeds and other health problems they had developed. “And I’m glad to have that word to describe what the industry does. It’s a bad word.”

Ruggiero and Tillman founded Shaletest, a nonprofit organization that provides baseline testing of air and water around drilling operations for lower-income families. Ruggiero said that the number of “Don’t frack with me!” kinds of yard signs in the Marcellus Shale is huge.

One of the most hilarious multiple uses of the word came in a 2010 skit performed on the Canadian television show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The skit opens with a newscaster introducing a distraught homeowner who claims that “These fracking companies come in and start fracking everywhere …. my water used to be completely clear and now it’s completely fracked.”

A fracking expert is introduced who tells her she’s the victim of a lousy frack, maybe even of having been “clusterfracked.”

The housewife then asks if these “fracking guys can just come in and frack my gashole without permission?”

Last week The New Yorker ran a zinger-filled satire piece called “Cranial Fracking” about the mythical process of harvesting “the vast reserves of natural gas found in the human head.”

In Frac Attack: Dawn of the Watershed, zombies take over Ithaca, New York, and mayhem ensues. Courtesy photo After cranial fracking, “Yes, now everything tastes like pineapple to me,” Ian Frazier wrote, “and there’s the pain, and I have these Christmas-tree valve arrays that make it impossible to fly on airplanes, and my pores combust spontaneously if I don’t keep the moistened towels on, but I recommend the procedure without reservation.”

If “fracking” is now being used as a weapon against the industry that created the term, it’s only the latest example of spin in the gas patch, something that’s been part of the process since the beginning.

When the landmen first hit the Barnett Shale almost 10 years ago and began collecting leases for gas development, they had some nice buzzwords to throw around, like “mailbox money.” People signing away their mineral rights were going to get royalties in the form of monthly checks delivered right to their mailboxes for the next 30, maybe even 50, years. The idea of steady, free money temporarily blinded most of the people in the Barnett Shale to anything else that might be involved in the drilling of those wells.

When residents of Fort Worth, the epicenter of the Barnett Shale, began doing the math and realizing that their mailbox money was not going to amount to much, the landmen simply added “bonus money” — money paid at the lease signing — to their phrase list and began offering larger and larger bonuses to secure those leases. If some of them later reneged on the agreements worked out via neighborhood associations, well, it was just business.

It wasn’t until actual drilling began that residents realized all the other innocent-sounding words that were being used to dress up a very dirty business. Those “water trucks” barreling through their neighborhoods, they found, were not only endangering kids and tearing up their streets, but the “water” they carried was often laced with highly toxic chemicals.

There were explosions and fires and air contaminated with benzene. There were poisonous spills and water wells that frequently went bad when fracking started in the vicinity. Turned out that the “saltwater” disposal wells the industry also wanted to drill for getting rid of wastes really were to be injected full of highly toxic, sometimes radioactive, and, yes, intensely salty liquids.

Then there was the use of eminent domain to lay gas pipes and the construction of compressor stations that, despite industry commercials touting its commitment to clean water and clean air, billowed clouds of unhealthy gases (though visible only with infrared cameras).

Finally, there was that mailbox money, which fell off precipitously after the first six months a well was in service, and then fell off again when the glut of natural gas being produced resulted in a severe drop in prices. These days, the royalties frequently total no more than $10 to $15 an acre — and not many people in Fort Worth have anything close to an acre.

Ruggiero talked about a shale gas well blowout in Pennsylvania some months ago that led to the evacuation of 12 families from the area. When the news hit the press, he said, the industry called it a “temporary relocation,” not an evacuation.

“All they do is spin,” Ruggiero said. “They talk about creating jobs, lessening dependence on foreign oil — all well and good — but they only use those things to get them off the hook for the damage they do.”

Gary Hogan, who served on both of Fort Worth’s gas drilling ordinance committees under former Mayor Mike Moncrief, said the industry definitely brought the word “frack” down on itself.

“Everywhere this industry goes it’s the same story: bad air, ruined roads, spills, poisoned wells,” he said. “We were the first urban area to be fracked, but as the industry moves across the country, the people coming after us have had something to look at, something to read, before the drillers arrived.”

If you’re willing to wear your drilling sentiments on your skin, try a temporary tattoo like this one. earthworksaction.org Along the way, companies like Chesapeake have shelled out millions to improve their image, donating money to seemingly endless charities. The annual day-after-Thanksgiving holiday parade became the “Chesapeake Parade of Lights,” a title that made many local people wince.

Hogan says that it’s apparent that the industry is spending money to fight activists with public relations campaigns “rather than trying to drill more responsibly. They’re trying to fight a movement that’s going worldwide: France doesn’t want any part of it. China would rather just buy the gas from us than find itself fracked.”

“I think the real problem is that these gas companies just don’t have the technology to do this work safely and cleanly in urban areas,” said Kim Feil, an Arlington activist who carries a life-sized dummy she’s dubbed BenZene and wears a gas mask to anti-gas drilling rallies. “And if they don’t, they don’t need to be fracking up our neighborhoods.”

Possibly the first anti-drilling bumper sticker in the nation and certainly the first in Texas that related to the natural gas industry was Don Young’s 2007 “You can’t drink natural gas.”

“I don’t know that I ever heard the word ‘fracking’ until I read it in a newspaper from Pennsylvania in 2008,” Young said. “But it certainly has taken off, and it’s got such a nasty ring to it.”

Since then, Hogan said, the number of people actively opposed to drilling has become too large to marginalize. “The industry brought this on themselves,” he said. “They were the ones focusing on the fracking to try to take our eyes off all of the other issues that have a negative impact on our lives. And activists finally picked up on that and began using it against them.”

The rhetoric may be getting even stinkier — and funnier. Deborah Rogers said that she was in New York speaking about the economics of natural gas when a man approached her and introduced himself as a member of Pedal Power, a grassroots group that promotes bicycle riding.

“He told me the group’s new campaign slogan was ‘Pedal Power, powered by clean-burning natural ass.’ ”

Despite all these supposedly “polluted” wells, the EPA still claims there is not one case of a water well contaminated by hydraulic fracturing.

These wells do not exist!

Psychology is powerful. People get sick and develop all sorts of ailments because they THINK they are being poisoned.

If you do not establish a baseline test for your water, you cannot claim “contamination” after drilling.....but this is what liberals have done.

The latest tactic is that everything is “fracking”. Drilling is “fracking”. Pipelines are “fracking”. Truck traffic is “fracking”.

Knowing the left, I predict they will burn-out the term by overuse.

Meanwhile, the industry is reminding people that clean, domestic natural gas, produced by American workers earning above-average wages is what every environmentalist begged for.......until we found a near-limitless supply under our feet.

Remember, environmentalists were all in favor of wind power until the cost/benefit analysis started looking good. Now, environmentalists oppose windmills because they affect birds, harm bats and are an eyesore.

My gosh!

I worked as engineer in the petroleum industry for my whole career, and I never before heard of a “drilling activist”.

And speaking of choices of words, we (or a service company) pumped water, ‘chemicals’, and sand under sufficient pressure to fracture tight formations. Don’t remember ever hearing about ‘blasting’ water, etc into formations.

“And speaking of choices of words, we (or a service company) pumped water, ‘chemicals’, and sand under sufficient pressure to fracture tight formations. Don’t remember ever hearing about ‘blasting’ water, etc into formations.”

Of course you can sensationalize it better by using the word blasting. Once upon a time they did blast to fracture well with nitroglycerin in an open hole completion before hydraulic fracturing was developed.

These are people who expect the state to take care of them. They don’t know how anything gets built, they don’t have any idea what it takes to make the world work.

They just know they want theirs, they want you to provide it to them, and then they want you to acknowledge their moral superiority to the people they depend upon for their very lives.

They don’t realize how it backfires. Millions of people work in oil, and therefore millions of people listen to this claptrap and realize that they, and their favorite politicians, are completely full of it. Juvenile, or dishonest, or both.

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