Sunday, January 31, 2010

Into the Fray (s) ...

Once again, it seems the oil industry has missed an opportunity to be proactive and provide the public with critical information that could help citizens impacted by oil drilling make intelligent and informed decisions. I speak of course of the Marcellus Shale play, where there is an ongoing debate over the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing (identifying it by its full technical name avoids all those style questions about "frac' -ing" or "fracking" - see http://blogs.chron.com/newswatchenergy/archives/2010/01/post_12.html).
We all know that our industry has access to plenty of technology tools for the timely distribution of information about leasing, drilling, and completions. So why are we not sharing this information as far as necessary or possible with the public? In Pennsylvania and West Virginia, we have the opportunity to develop a fresh relationship with communities not already numbingly familiar with the oil and gas business like in parts of the South and West. Yet it takes a bunch of social activists from MIT to decide that information about oil and gas leasing should be made available to communities through Google Earth?
See: http://civic.mit.edu/projects/c4fcm/extract
C'mon guys...

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