Political conflict over hydraulic fracturing turns on a semantic point crucial but perhaps not evident to the oil and gas industry. Opponents of the industry have made fracing a lever of environmental objection, saying the procedure threatens water supplies and causes earthquakes.
Producers respond that fracing injects largely benign fluids into rock layers separated from groundwater by thousands of feet of impermeable rock. They note that fracing has occurred for 60 years, under heavy state regulation, without contaminating water supplies or toppling skyscrapers.
Those statements are factual. But when producers discuss fracing, they address consequences in the injection zone, typically nowadays shale, deep in the subsurface. Activists and people they aim to frighten take a broader view. To them, fracing isn't a brief, intense operation with remote geophysical effects. It's a more general disturbance of the biosphere.
To nonindustry observers, the unseen, subsurface aspects of this disturbance must seem mysterious and therefore sinister. Fracing happens "down there." Water supplies are "down there." Peril must lurk "down there." Fear about subsurface effects is easy for activists to provoke.
But popular concern doesn't confine itself to "down there." Fracing amasses heavy trucks and imposing machinery on bucolic landscapes and infuses native populations with crowds of workers from elsewhere. Sudden, if temporary, industrialization in places unaccustomed to it disrupts people and their habitat far more than anything that occurs downhole during a frac job. And, yes, with so much unconventional oil and gas work now under way, chemicals will slop onto the ground now and then. To oil and gas producers, activity aboveground technically isn't fracing. To everyone else, it is.
In its altogether necessary defense of fracing, the industry must never stick its head in the reservoir and ignore what happens where grass grows. Fracing has environmental consequences far beyond the tight rocks in which it occurs.
Especially with social and economic dimensions of those consequences, producers must take extreme care—while they try just as hard not to spill anything.
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