It started on a Texas farm called Hard Scrabble.
It was there that Robert B. Jackson, now a professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University, encountered the gas boom to come. His father-in-law, the environmental writer John Graves, had made Hard Scrabble famous in his books. So Mr. Jackson was surprised, nearly a decade ago, when news came that Mr. Graves would allow two natural-gas wells on the ranch.
The company would drill deep, arcing horizontally into shale, black fossilized mud that had cooked ancestral algae into gas, releasing the fuel with a blast of sand, water, and chemicals. Mr. Graves didn’t see much risk with the drilling, Mr. Jackson says. If they could do it while sparing the environment, why not?
- Fracking vs. ‘Fracking’
When scientists and the public think about fracking, they often hold very different thoughts in mind, whether about the most likely environmental risks, the depths involved, or the simple definition of the word.
Mr. Jackson, then at Duke University, studied climate change. But as he saw the wells erected at Hard Scrabble, followed by fevered national debate over hydraulic fracturing—"fracking,” as it’s come to be known—he saw a need for science. Was drilling benign? Corrosive? Would it pollute groundwater or air, cause earthquakes or more warming than expected? There were movies and websites about it, but little research. He looked but could find no studies on whether fracking was associated with water problems, his particular interest. The discussion was polarized, and facts seemed thin on the ground.
He thought the world would welcome a little scientific clarity.
“I’m not a white-hat, black-hat kind of guy,” Mr. Jackson says. “I don’t think that I’m the white hat, and everybody else, especially everybody else in industry, is the black hat. That’s not how I see the world. Which explains some of my naïveté about some of the responses we got.”
What Mr. Jackson got was a pair of furious companies, including one run by a donor vital to his university; an online campaign to discredit his research; legal threats; and, later, the ire of antifracking activists. He wanted to provide answers, but much of the world had already made up its mind.
Robert Jackson
Robert Jackson, now at Stanford, managed to anger both supporters and foes of fracking.
Mr. Jackson is not alone in his troubles. A handful of scientists have chosen to investigate the environmental effects of fracking. Some have been harassed by mouthpieces for the oil-and-gas industry and, lacking tenure, have been forced out of academe. Others have walked a fine line between advocacy and activism. All have felt the stress that comes when their work leaves the lab and enters the world.
Outsiders often view science as a font of objectivity, and in many ways it is. But scientists themselves are not immune to ideology. They are products of their communities, their times, and their history. And when they choose to investigate a polarized topic like fracking—or climate change, gun violence, nuclear power—they put themselves, and their views, in the cross hairs. Only the most cautious can come through unscathed.
Mr. Jackson’s work began in Pennsylvania, in 2010. Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, where he taught, had received inquiries from homeowners concerned about fracking in the Marcellus shale, a deposit that extends under much of the state and beyond. With Avner Vengosh, a close collaborator at Duke, he’d use a state database to find drilling sites, and then call nearby homeowners with private wells, common in rural Pennsylvania, to see if they’d let the researchers sample their drinking water.
By 2011, the two were ready to publish their first paper in a prestigious scientific journal. They had found no evidence of drilling fluids in drinking water, but they had found increased methane in the water of people living within a kilometer of drilling wells. It was a significant discovery.
“And that’s when it all started,” Mr. Jackson says.
Mr. Jackson was not the first scientist to wade into fracking. But as he would see, when data are limited, the positions that many researchers end up taking on shale gas seems to depend on where they started.
There’s no better example than the sputtering, feuding, cordial friendship between Anthony R. Ingraffea, a recently retired professor of engineering at Cornell University, and Terry Engelder, a geoscience professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Both men are experts in how rocks, under pressure, break. They’ve gone on geology tours together. They’ve co-written a paper. They’ve long done industry-financed research. Yet despite those common roots, the two professors have found themselves as leaders of ever-separating branches of the fracking debate.
Pennsylvania State U.
Terry Engelder, of Penn State, said shale gas would power the state’s economy.
In 2007, Mr. Engelder concluded that Pennsylvania had huge untapped gas reserves, sparking a rush. He became a minor celebrity and cheerleader for fracking. Shale gas would power the state’s economy, he said, and if the industry made mistakes, it would work to correct them.
His new role hasn’t come without opposition. He’s academic enemy No. 1 to many antifracking activists. Outraged alumni of Penn State have emailed the university’s president about him. A TEDx talk he did has an almost equal number of likes and dislikes on YouTube, when nearly every other TED talk he’s looked at online seems to attract all thumbs up.
Mr. Engelder sees himself as an American optimist, confident in the ability of markets to solve issues. “His belief is wealth before health,” Mr. Ingraffea says. He fits in well at Penn State, an institution with close ties to the energy industry. The questions he asks tend to be the ones drillers want answered: Will this shale formation have gas? Why does the chemistry of used fracking water change over time? Mr. Engelder’s position is one that few scientists find controversial, as long as it’s transparent.
Mr. Ingraffea, though, has never been so certain about the beneficence of business leaders. As Mr. Engelder puts it, he thinks of them as reckless hunters. Mr. Ingraffea’s favorite phrase for their behavior: “Fire, aim, ready.”
Robert Barker, University Photography
Anthony Ingraffea, of Cornell, sees himself as a science-based advocate for caution in fracking.
At Cornell, Mr. Ingraffea got involved with Robert W. Howarth, a biogeochemist who wanted to test the premise that natural gas was better for the climate than coal. He had never met Mr. Howarth, but this seemed a worthy subject, and he was worried about what drilling could do to New York’s trout streams.
They assembled a model that found natural gas to be as bad as coal mining in its warming emissions, largely because of methane leaks. The study was based on scant data and debatable assumptions. “We didn’t measure anything,” Mr. Ingraffea says. “We conjectured on best available information.”
In 2010, Mr. Howarth sent a draft around. Word spread. Mr. Engelder was one of the first to attack it, calling it “disingenuous” in an op-ed.
According to Mr. Ingraffea, an industry group bought an online ad calling the two scientists “fools”; it popped up whenever someone searched for Mr. Howarth. Soon fracking’s online voice, Energy in Depth, began lashing out.
No scientist can go far on fracking without encountering Energy in Depth. The website, financed by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, works like a hyperactive immune system, chasing down even minor threats. Mr. Ingraffea has been mentioned in more than 120 posts on the site since 2011. Run a web search on his name, and those posts are unavoidable.
“Their job is to kill the messenger,” he says.
Mr. Ingraffea has certainly antagonized the industry. He supports antifracking celebrities, sending the actor Mark Ruffalo information for a tweet and appearing in the sequel to Josh Fox’s Gasland, an antifracking documentary. He sees himself as a science-based advocate for caution: The research hasn’t shown that shale drilling is safe. Hold off. No rush.
Over the past few years, Mr. Ingraffea says, “Terry and I have engaged in friendship at a distance.” They’ve never doubted each other’s sincerity. They appeared in cordial opposition on panels. Mr. Engelder regrets his op-ed attack. Maybe they could still have a new geology tour in the future.
But if they do, their worldviews will remain, and each one will be scientifically valid. Both men acknowledge human-driven climate change. How quickly it will proceed is a matter of legitimate debate. Mr. Ingraffea is biased toward action, believes that the change will happen fast, and wants a move to a carbon-free economy, stat. Mr. Engelder believes that it might be slower, and that expanding electrification, even fossil-fueled, to increase wealth and education in the developing world is more pressing.
“There is no scale to judge these two particular outcomes in terms of clear and present danger to us,” Mr. Engelder says.
Seeing how ideology influences even scientists’ views on fracking, Mr. Jackson knew he had to be vigilant about retaining his neutrality. The lesson was drilled in on his field campaigns in Pennsylvania. Walk up a driveway, and the first question was: “Who’s paying for your research?”
This was simple, dogged fieldwork. Eighteen-hour days. Pump the well to a steady state and sample. Run basic tests, then more in the lab. Listen.
Each person had a different story. The joyous dairy farmer who bought new equipment. Homeowners in tears, fearing contaminated water, some lamenting their lack of mineral rights.
The scientists worked quietly, but word of their research spread. And soon Duke got a call from one of its most loyal alumni.
Aubrey K. McClendon was chief executive and chairman of Chesapeake Energy Corporation, a big player in fracking. He had given millions of dollars to Duke; a tower on the campus was named for him. Why not come out to headquarters and get their perspective, he suggested.
The Duke team agonized over whether to go. They feared tainting their research. Mr. Jackson is not anticorporate. He’s worked for Dow Chemical, and his father was a petrochemical executive. And Chesapeake had the data the researchers desired: They could sample wells only after drilling. Chesapeake had tested them beforehand.
A month before their study came out, they flew to the company’s headquarters, in Oklahoma City. On the plane, someone had left a Forbes in Mr. Jackson’s seat pocket, with a list of the wealthiest people in America. No. 359: Aubrey McClendon.
The daylong meeting was civil. Chesapeake stayed vague, Mr. Jackson says, all videos and principles. Disagreement was evident. Chesapeake attributed the methane to natural leaks. That was plausible: Sample local basements and sometimes you’ll detect methane. But the pattern Duke found defied a natural cause.
Jim Wilson, The New York Times
At sites like this one, in West Texas, a chemist at the U. of Texas at Arlington is studying fracking’s effects on groundwater. “It’s obviously going to get a lot of attention,” he says.
Still, there were those predrilling records. “It was a pushpin map literally in the room that we met,” Mr. Jackson recalls. The scientists told Chesapeake that if it shared the data behind that map, they would share their numbers. Both sets would have to be scrubbed of personal details, but the collaboration would be worth it. If the Duke team was wrong, this would prove it. Mr. Jackson left hopeful but was crestfallen when Chesapeake sent a PowerPoint presentation summarizing methane levels—an empty gesture, in his view.
Mr. McClendon was equally disappointed with the meeting, he told The Chronicle in an email. “They had already reached their conclusion about the industry’s activities in [Northeast] Pennsylvania before they met the experts on the topic,” he wrote.
The study came out to an avalanche of publicity. “Fracking contaminates drinking water,” headlines blared, to Mr. Jackson’s dismay: The researchers couldn’t say if the gas came from poor well construction or from fracturing deep underground. It was a distinction lost on many journalists. Language failed them. There’s fracking, and then there’s “fracking.” Catchy, scary, “fracking” had come to stand for every step of drilling while still also referring to the technical process of fracturing rocks. This dual meaning drives thousands of arguments.
Mr. McClendon was outraged. According to Duke sources, he called the university’s president. He called the provost. He contacted other donors. Mr. McClendon disputes all of that. In any case, his objections found their way to Mr. Jackson’s dean.
“When one of the biggest donors of your university calls you a disgrace, that gets the administration’s attention.”
“When one of the biggest donors of your university calls you a disgrace, that gets the administration’s attention,” the professor says. “It puts them in an awkward position. Now they’re trying to navigate a development office who’s spent a decade or more cultivating a relationship and a couple of professors who’ve written a paper.”
Chesapeake put forward a narrative about the scientists: They came with an agenda. The company had offered to share data, it said, and the scientists had refused. In part, the Duke team had walked into this mess, in particular with an op-ed essay they wrote that ended: “The faster we develop and adopt renewable energy technologies, the less we will have to worry about whether it’s safe for people to drink their water.”
There’s no sentence Mr. Jackson regrets more. “It could have been interpreted to mean, ‘These guys are against fracking,’ " he says. “I’ve never called for a ban on fracking or anything like that.”
The damage was done. Mr. McClendon soon had a letter in Duke’s alumni magazine: “Their real goal was to attack all forms of natural-gas drilling, presumably so that the supply of natural gas would decline … and their beloved ‘green fuels’ could become somewhat less uneconomic than they are today.”
As Mr. McClendon waged his war, Mr. Jackson’s name began showing up ever more often on the Energy In Depth website. Friends told him to watch his back. Surely, he thought, this wouldn’t threaten his career.
Out west, it probably would have.
That’s the conclusion of Jeffrey A. Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming. Like neighboring states, Wyoming depends on fossil fuels for its economy. And that has made the region susceptible to industry pressure. “We’re just a really good lens” for how that influence works, he says. Mr. Lockwood will document these controversies in a book, Behind the Carbon Curtain (University of New Mexico Press), due out next year.
One chapter will feature a former academic scientist whose career fell apart thanks to several public comments on fracking. The researcher talked with The Chronicle on condition of anonymity, for fear of complicating his attempts to work in the oil-and-gas industry.
“Mr. Black” was a research scientist at a public university where research is often financed by the energy industry. He’d spent his career working on oil, gas, and water, and a decade ago he began wondering about fracking. He reviewed a government report on the topic for an environmental group, and his comments were picked up in newspapers. He got a call from his department head. “You can’t say this,” he was told; it could seem as if he were representing the institution.
Fair enough. Soon Mr. Black began modeling fracking’s impact on water in another region. He talked with the news media again. He was called into a vice president’s office. “You’re going to drop this,” the VP said.
The university was under pressure from alumni, trustees, and the drilling industry, Mr. Black says. He was a research professor without tenure. He stopped talking. Soon enough, he was told that he’d get only half-time funding for his work. He got the message and left for another state university. He recorded a YouTube video talking about his problems and fell into similar trouble, although, separately, he also clashed with his boss. His contract was not renewed.
He’s out of academe, the only kind of work he has ever wanted. “I can’t imagine a better job,” he says.
He’s started a new company trying—the irony is not lost on him—to improve the effectiveness of fracking fluids. His income has dropped 70 percent. He says he’s talked with other researchers who’ve had problems like his, though he would not share their names. (A former scientist at the University of Pittsburgh told a similar story several years ago to This American Life.) His industry friends have said it will be impossible for him to land a corporate job again.
“I will never get hired, because of five minutes on YouTube,” he says.
It did not go that way at Duke. The administration rebuffed Mr. McClendon, but at some pain to the university, which gained a suite of miffed well-heeled alumni in the energy business. The tension subsided only partially when questions emerged about Mr. McClendon’s leadership of Chesapeake, including his use of its assets.
Epa, Jim Lo Scalzo, Landov
Antifracking signs dot a Pennsylvania homeowner’s landscape.
The online attacks against Mr. Jackson continued. Energy In Depth disputed his motives and said, incorrectly, that he was financed by prominent opponents of fracking. He heard the same talking points time and again. It was dismaying that people in the industry didn’t do more to defend him. It felt as if he were living a chapter out of the book Merchants of Doubt—if industry disputed his science, they wouldn’t have to deal with its implications.
“These attacks were organized,” Mr. Jackson says. “They’re well funded. And in my opinion, these people are not interested in figuring out what’s happening. They’re interested in destroying your credibility.”
No scientific response disputed the Duke researchers’ methane correlations. They expanded their sampling beyond Pennsylvania. In Arkansas they found no evidence of drilling-based contamination. They developed new ways of judging, by using noble-gas tracers, whether methane came from fracturing or from leaky wells. In late 2012 they went to Parker County, Tex., not far from Hard Scrabble, to test that method out.
A couple months later, the letters started arriving.
Or, rather, the box. A lawyer representing Range Resources Corporation, another fracking giant, sent Mr. Jackson a file box of documents. We understand you’re sampling in Parker, he wrote. Here’s our data. The box held hundreds of pages, most of them publicly available. The letter did not ask him to do anything. He let it be.
The scientists kept sampling. When they found evidence of contaminated water, they let the homeowners know. A few of those residents talked to a reporter. More letters arrived from Range’s lawyer. You’re giving your data to reporters, not to us, the company said. “And then the letters got progressively more aggressive,” Mr. Jackson says.
Archive everything you’ve got, their gist went, for a possible subpoena. Mr. Jackson was at a loss. He feared a lawsuit. He turned to the university counsel, who had him track down every document. What if he missed one? In the digital age, it seems easy for things to slip from notice. Another letter arrived, accusing Duke of not responding or giving Range what it wanted.
Mr. Jackson felt that Range was setting up a narrative to paint the Duke scientists as researchers with an agenda if the letters became public. (The company’s spokesman, Matt Pitzarella, noting that the company faces lawsuits in Parker County, says it is simply seeking access to all relevant data.) Mr. Jackson insisted that the scientists’ return letters include data they’d like from Range. He wanted the record to show that there were simple steps Range could take to help him get to the bottom of the controversy.
“In another place, if I didn’t have tenure, the university might have forced me out.”
It was stressful. “That’s part of the strategy, to make it as difficult as possible on the scientists,” the professor says. He often lies awake at night. If he had been more marginal, his story could have ended differently, he believes. “In another place, if I didn’t have tenure, the university might have forced me out.”
The research continued. The framework was promising, but Mr. Jackson was frustrated that critics could still repeat the same talking point: They sampled only after drilling.
The researchers needed to find a fracking boom before it started.
Turns out, Kevin A. Schug got there first.
Mr. Schug, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, is an analytical chemist. It was only when he arrived in Arlington and saw gas wells on the campus that the extent and research potential of the shale boom dawned on him. He saw Mr. Jackson’s work, but it was all that seemed to be out there. Surely someone should look at Texas’ water?
Without industry or nonprofit support, his team started a project that, for the first time, will sample land before and during fracking. Residents of West Texas who lived above a possible new gas field, seeing analyses he’d done on 100 wells in North Texas, asked him to come out.
The university supports his work, but has been careful: The president and provost keep tabs on it, and counsel is involved. No work comes out before peer review. These researchers haven’t drawn much pressure, but they’ve yet to release a major study. The real fruits of their sampling, including the first results from West Texas, will be out early this year. Mr. Schug is bracing for it.
“It’s obviously going to get a lot of attention,” he says.
Meanwhile, Mr. Jackson has moved to Stanford University, and his team this fall released a study showing that, for eight clusters of methane contamination, it was faulty wells, not deep fracking, that were responsible for fugitive gas. The drillers weren’t opening cracks connected to the surface. New York and Maryland leaned heavily on that research for their recent fracking decisions: New York restricted drilling; Maryland let it go forward.
With these more recent results, the industry pressure on Mr. Jackson has died down. He’s had no more letters from Range Resources. Now it’s the people who championed his early findings who seem annoyed. “It became less of an existential threat to the industry,” he says. “In some sense, we started getting more criticism from the environmental side.”
Mr. Jackson returns often to Hard Scrabble, where the gas wells churn without incident. His father-in-law died in 2013. The farm has entered a chapter that will be shaped, in part, by its newfound energy abundance. It’s a path that Mr. Jackson, using the clearest judgment he can, will help see through.
Fracking vs. ‘Fracking’
When scientists and the public think about “fracking,” they often hold very different thoughts in mind, whether about the most likely environmental risks, the depths involved, or the simple definition of the word.
Fracking
Hydraulic fracturing has been around for decades. It describes any drilling technique that pumps water, sand, and chemicals underground to blast apart rock. (It doesn’t have to be hydraulic: the U.S. government once tried nuclear fracturing.) Called “fracing” for short in the industry, with a hard “C,” it did not gain its clarifying “K” until the shale-gas rush of the past decade.
‘Fracking’
As shale gas spread, “fracking"—catchy, scary, vaguely obscene-sounding—has become a public term to describe every part of the unconventional oil-and-gas extraction process, from leasing land to the disposal of the huge quantities of water used in drilling. Some geologists and engineers have accepted this broader usage, but many others have not.
Paul Voosen is a senior reporter covering the sciences. Write him at paul.voosen@chronicle.com; follow him on Twitter @voooos; or see past work at voosen.me.