Marcellus Goes Global: South Korean TV Crew Covers Shale Conference

• 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.

In many respects, this year’s Shale Gas Insight conference has been much more low-key than last year’s session. There weren’t as many protestors outside, there weren’t as many reporters covering speeches, and there wasn’t as much buzz inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
But the Marcellus Shale drilling boom still matters. The best evidence of that fact is the film crew from the South Korean public television network KBS, who is here trying to get a handle on shale drilling.

Reporter Felix Kwon said South Koreans have a vested interest in American shale production: the country will begin importing 3.5 million tons of natural gas a year, beginning in 2017. He and his two-man crew are here to answer basic questions: “What is shale gas? What kind of technology are they using? How does it produce? More importantly for us – for how long, and how stable and reliable?”
Kwon quickly realized what every energy reporter already knows: hydraulic fracturing is “not easily understandable for normal people. How you get gas out of rock? It’s pretty complicated.”
KBN hopes to answer those questions for South Korean public television views in the hour-long program the network is producing.

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