NY Post Tackles Fracking

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Opening up a world of endless possibilities, the kings of double entendre headlines – we’re thinking HIDE THE WEINER here – have now entered the fracking fray.
Today’s New York Post carries an op-ed article titled “Why Fracking Is Safe.” In it, author Karen Moreau makes the case that hype about hydraulic fracturing is overblown. For starters, she points out, those stories-high drilling rigs go away, once the gas begins flowing out of the ground.

Finished sites, once the rigs pull out and the soil is reclaimed, usually consist of a fenced area the size of a large living room, with several small pipes protruding about three feet from the ground with two small water tanks. They’re easy to overlook among the farm equipment and pasture of the countryside.
In hardhat, safety glasses and work boots, I shadowed the men on the frontline for Chesapeake Energy. “Drilling is an art,” smiled foreman Josh Bradford, 37, a fourth-generation Louisiana oil-and-gas man. But it’s also science and engineering: The computer screen in his office trailer detailed the precise path carved by the huge rotary drill a few hundred feet away.

Moreau is right about the fact that producing wells are relatively quiet, and don’t have much equipment sticking out of the ground. But when it comes to size, I’ll push back on the idea that “a large living room” is three acres. Especially when we’re taking Manhattan real estate.
Our neighbors to the north are taking a closer look at fracking these days, as Governor Andrew Cuomo and state regulators hash out guidelines that will open New York to Marcellus Shale drilling. Just last week, in fact, New York’s City Council held a hearing on the issue.

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