The year in fracking

Or fracing, fraccing or frac’ing

By FRITZ MAYER

REGION — We, in the Upper Delaware Valley, learned a lot about gas drilling in 2008. We learned that a subterranean mass of rock called the Marcellus Shale contains enough trapped gas to alter the near-term future of energy use in this country. We learned that people known as landmen will sometimes be less than candid when trying to obtain gas drilling leases from property owners. And we learned about a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which water, sand and other chemicals?some of them highly toxic to human beings?are forced into the shale to facilitate the gas-collection process.

What we did not learn, however, was the accepted way to spell the abbreviation of the process, though many versions are floating around the Internet.

Congressman Maurice Hinchey, in an early December news release, used the spelling “fracking,” which is one of the most common forms, the one used by The River Reporter and is ubiquitous on the Internet. However, Hinchey’s commitment to this spelling seems tentative, for in the written comments he submitted to the NY Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) on December 15, he avoided the use of the abbreviation and used the more formal “fracturing” to discuss his concern about the process.

Dr. Bill Pammer, the Sullivan County Commissioner of Planning, in a handout released in November, used the spelling “fracing,” with no K. Again, however, he avoided the question entirely in comments submitted to the DEC; here he, too, used the more formal “fracturing.”

But “fracing” with no K can also be found in many places on the Internet, as in this sentence from website of Enermax, a Texas energy exploration company: “Fracing is used both to open up fractures already present in the formation and create new fractures.”

But there are yet more ways to spell this controversial practice. Chesapeake Energy, an energy company that has purchased a number of leases in the Upper Delaware Valley, has its own way of spelling it: with no K and a double C. A sentence on their website reads, “From the time the pad preparation begins for a single well, the entire process of setting up the rig, drilling, fracture stimulating (“fraccing”) and installing operational equipment takes two to eight weeks.”

But perhaps the spelling that seems most curious when one stumbles upon it for the first time is the spelling with one C and an apostrophe. This example comes from the nature publication Orion Magazine: “This ‘hydraulic fracturing,’ or ‘frac’ing,’ cracks the rock in which the gas is trapped in small pockets, and allows the gas to flow toward the well…”

The Colorado Environmental Coalition also likes this spelling. The headline from a story published on their website dated September 2007 reads, “Halliburton Talks Frac’ing with BLM” (Bureau of Land Management).

Finally, there is an entirely different spelling that some in the energy industry use, with a T in place of the K. In the June 4, 2008 edition of Oil and Gas Investor, a headline read, “Fracting Boosts Empyrean Energy Well Output.”

At The River Reporter, we use “fracking” mostly because it’s the first spelling we happened upon. But also, it is spelled similarly to, and rhymes with, the words tracking, stacking, lacking and whacking.

We’ve come to discover, however, that “fracking” has another meaning that we weren’t heretofore aware of.

“Frack” was used in the 1970s in the television series Battlestar Galactica as a substitute for a four-letter swear word. This is especially interesting in light of the concerns activists have regarding fracking’s impact on the environment. In other words, in 50 years, when gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale is played out, will the entire region be fracked?

And just to show that even on a TV series, language is constantly evolving, when the Battlestar Galactica series was reborn in 2003, the spelling of this fictional curse word was changed to “frak.”