Votes against fracing

Dec. 2, 2013
Votes last month in at least three Colorado communities against hydraulic fracturing should remind the oil and gas industry that sound reasons exist to oppose activity involving the completion technique.

Votes last month in at least three Colorado communities against hydraulic fracturing should remind the oil and gas industry that sound reasons exist to oppose activity involving the completion technique. In its political exertions, the industry should make hard distinctions between sound reasons and the other kind.

Majorities of voting Coloradans in Boulder, Fort Collins, and Lafayette approved bans or moratoriums on hydraulic fracturing. In Broomfield, voters initially seemed to have narrowly defeated an antifracing initiative, but late-arriving absentee ballots apparently reversed the outcome, now awaiting a recount. The Colorado towns join about 100 municipalities across the US in which voters have approved bans or suspensions of an operation essential to production from low-permeability reservoirs.

Triumphs of activism

These votes partly represent triumphs of activism by groups opposing any hydraulic fracturing anywhere. From such groups citizens have heard that fracing poisons drinking water, allows tap water to catch fire, sickens people who live near well sites in variously gruesome ways, aggravates global warming, and generally threatens humanity. The activism works. It frightens sensible adults. The news media can't use the word "fracking" without describing it as controversial—misrepresenting it as a drilling technique with laughable frequency. France prohibits the operation altogether.

It's no coincidence that opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline deploy many of the same warnings: threats to drinking water, mysterious illnesses near operational sites, global warming. The tactics frighten people who have no reason to know better. Frightened people are easily mobilized against activities that frighten them.

Supposedly frightening hydraulic fracturing, however, has been used for many decades without horrible consequence and is essential to the development of rich new supplies of oil and natural gas. In those ways, too, fracing is like the supposedly frightening Keystone XL pipeline, a well-established transport method needed to accommodate growing production from Canadian oil sands. The parallels point to a motive behind campaigns of exaggeration against both operations. New methods for developing resources in continuous, low-permeability reservoirs and in the oil sands are expanding supplies of affordable and convenient fossil energy. They promise to prolong the Age of Petroleum, a prospect abhorrent to many environmentalists. Loathing of hydrocarbons motivates environmental campaigns against Keystone XL and hydraulic fracturing, even if it's not shared by people supporting those efforts out of simple worry that allegations about threats to drinking water, air, and all the rest might be true.

The oil and gas industry should address these motives directly. When it encounters the exaggerations and hostility typical of obstructionist activism, it should demand to know what the activists really want. The usually camouflaged yet inevitable answer is displacement of affordable energy by more-costly alternatives. Most Americans don't want that.

It's no exaggeration, however, to call hydraulic fracturing disruptive. At the frequency and job size at which the technique is practiced today, the activity has obvious consequences. Work associated with it brings heavy industry to unaccustomed places and outsiders to communities wary of intrusion. It's noisy. It raises dust and emits disagreeable odors. It puts fleets of heavy trucks on roads not made for the load. It carries the risk of accidents.

These effects hardly amount to the poisoning of water or air. They're temporary. Still, they're predictable, and they're environmental.

A community should not have to endure the genuine inconveniences affiliated with hydraulic fracturing if a majority of its citizens consider the disruption not worth related economic benefits. It would be unreasonable for the oil and gas industry to think otherwise.

Two goals

As more and more communities weigh these decisions, the industry should pursue two goals. In its relations with community leaders and citizens, it should expose and discredit radical motives behind much antifracing activism. It should address the real environmental issues openly and honestly and be ready to fix whatever damage its work causes.

The other goal relates to the work itself. It is to cause as little damage as possible in the first place.