Fighting 'fracked gas,' activists fracture facts

March 31, 2014
Environmental activism has produced a new pearl of provocative meaninglessness: "fracked gas."

Environmental activism has produced a new pearl of provocative meaninglessness: "fracked gas."

What's fractured in the completion technique demonized by extremists is, of course, rock. Nobody fractures gas. There can be no fractured—or "fracked"—gas.

But why worry about facts? The phrase "fracked gas" crackles with menace and amplifies the manifold distortions of environmentalist propaganda.

A letter from 16 pressure groups to President Barack Obama regrets the administration's alleged support for hydraulic fracturing and "your plan to build liquefied natural gas export terminals along US coastlines that would ship large amounts of fracked gas around the world."

The letter targets Dominion's proposal to add liquefaction capacity at its LNG terminal at Cove Point, Md. Dominion has won Department of Energy approval for exports to all countries and has been notified by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission an environmental assessment will be issued May 15.

The letter asked Obama to make FERC prepare a full environmental impact statement. The added permitting time, certain to be extended by litigation, would jeopardize the project.

Not long ago, environmentalists liked natural gas. They saw increased use of gas, with its low carbon-to-hydrogen ratio, as a constructive step toward a future dominated by renewable energy.

Not now.

"Cove Point, like other proposed LNG export terminals, will raise US gas prices…while becoming a historic catalyst for more fracking across the mid-Atlantic and triggering a huge new pulse of climate pollution," the letter-writers declared.

It's not that environmentalists only recently learned methane is a greenhouse gas. What they hate is hydraulic fracturing. Combined with horizontal drilling, the completion method heralds a rich new phase in the era of hydrocarbon energy.

The pressure groups want none of that—and none of the associated benefits for other people.

"We call on you," the writers told Obama, "to reverse course on this plan and commit instead to keeping most of our nation's fossil fuels reserves in the ground."

That's the economically unbearable agenda environmentalists push with their fracked facts.