Marcellus Shale: Disagreement Over Spelling of the F-Word
Not that one, silly! Is it fracking or fracing or frac'ing?
Philadelphia Inquirer
4 September 2011
By Andrew Maykuth,
The Marcellus Shale natural-gas industry has gotten tripped up by
the F-bomb.
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 natural-gas recovery process. 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 Wednesday protest 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 like 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.
Mr. 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
over when was the right age to talk to her child about fracking.
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
entrapped 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.
Mr. 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, Mr. 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," Mr. 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," replied Chris
Tucker of Energy in Depth, an oil and gas industry group based in
Washington.
Contact staff writer Andrew Maykuth at 215-854-2947 or
amaykuth@phillynews.com.