Is President Obama A Fracking Wonk?

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  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.

President Obama gave shale gas extraction a specific mention during last week’s State of the Union address. “We have a sup­ply of nat­ural gas that can last Amer­ica nearly one hun­dred years, and my Admin­is­tra­tion will take every pos­si­ble action to safely develop this energy,” he said on Tuesday. “Experts believe this will sup­port more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.”
How much does the president know about hydraulic fracturing? Quite a lot, according to Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas. Toward the end of the book, Kantor writes about a drilling-related question Obama fielded during a 2011 Philadelphia-area fundraiser:

“Someone asked about the use of shale gas as an energy source, and Obama launched into a long, virtuosic explanation of the scientific and policy issues. The attendees were duly impressed, but some of them wondered why he was giving ten-minute lectures on the intricacies of energy policy when the moment clearly called for something more.”

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