Published in the January 2013 issue

Crude oil looks like poison. Messy poison. On a drill site, it covers everything like a hemorrhage. It coats, smothers, smudges. The image of a gusher, where oil ejaculates from the earth through the latticed construction of a derrick, is an American cultural essential. You're covered in poison. You're letting the earth be covered in it, too. Because you're rich. Blood, poison, money. Oil shows itself.

Natural gas hides from sight. It is invisible, and its capture through the controversial process of high-pressure, high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing — fracking — takes place a mile or more beneath the ground, in space we never see.

In the black of the earth, where stone is broken by water, gas permeates the rock. Therein lies our salvation, the answer to our energy needs for a century, for a decade, for some stopgap moment in our history. There we are breaking the earth to get what we need. Fracking doesn't promise a mere possibility; it is not exploration. It is our most ancient certainty that we can break the earth to take what we must have.

The gas, though, never makes an appearance. What does show up, the only substance you can see, smell, and touch at the surface end of this process, is used fluid, forced upward by the weight of the earth and the initial pressure of the gas. The fluid is the primary poison in this process, the source of much of the controversy over fracking. It is fairly harsh stuff, but mostly in the same way swimming-pool water is harsh: chemicals diluted in water, making it, in fact, something other than water. On its return to the surface, it carries murk that settled down there 390 million years ago — mud, rock, and water that have not seen light or oxygen for several epochs. It is positively nasty.

But the gas? Billions of cubic feet fed through fracked wells daily. Replacing a generation's worth of demand until now met largely by imports. Pushing billions of dollars into the economies of states, including Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Wyoming, millions into the pockets of erstwhile farmers and other landholders. Heaping more millions in tax revenue from a source no one imagined just ten years ago. On a fracking site, the gas is always gone: to market, down the pipeline, to the cities, often burned within a few days of collection. And the gas keeps coming. The wells hiss the exhalation of the broken shale just as oil flows from the piercing of the earth.

People protest. They see the earth broken, fear toxins pooling, work to halt the industry. But everyone knows the gas is there. So it must be had. And when that's gone, we'll look for more — deeper in the earth, at the bottom of the ocean, in moons, in the sun, probably in the stars. Now, we crack more crust, seeking power.

The field offices of Cabot Oil & Gas are recessed from a county road outside Montrose, Pennsylvania, behind a three-foot wall of native Susquehanna County bluestone. Pickup trucks crowd the parking lot, livestock to market. The outside door is locked, but on a buzzer, so I don't even really have to say my name or what I'm after in order to get in. There's no cloak-and-dagger. The office is scaldingly white, with one of those clocks that count the days since an injury or an accident. It's in the 700's. On the walls are photographs of exemplar well pads and drilling rigs, shot from helicopter flybys, representations of pure expectation, as erect and squared off as old photographs of the space shuttle back when we expected some mysterious return from that technology. Each is the illustration of the progress of some month, or perhaps even a particular week, in the life of Cabot Oil & Gas, its fracking operation, an outfit that has hit the mother lode of shale gas in this area.

Someone just mopped. The office smells like victory.

Bill desRosiers, young, thick-armed, with the earnest haircut of a boy, wearing a Cabot polo shirt, emerges from an office that is not his and offers a meaty handshake. "I'm not sure what questions you have," he says, "but we'll answer them. Let me just get you some files to start with." He pushes through a doorway, beckons me to follow, throws back a folding chair, and begins to lay down the information one small pamphlet at a time. "This is what I thought you could start with," he says. "I'm assuming you want to see a site for yourself, though. Is that right?"

"What will I see out there?"

DesRosiers looks at his watch. "It's a tour. I'm taking you out there with a bunch of citizens. A group from the Delaware River Basin," he says. "They want to see some drilling. They want to see our wastewater-treatment facility. Mostly they want to see the work of things, since they aren't allowed to frack over there on their land." Due to their proximity to the Delaware River, fracking is not legally permitted on their properties. Much as fifteen miles to the north, in New York State, on the same expanse of rock we're standing above — the Marcellus Shale, which encompasses about ninety-five thousand square miles underground in four states — no one is allowed to hydraulically frack, thanks to a moratorium being enforced by Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, until, as they say, more is known.

DesRosiers pulls out a map of the county showing the edge-to-edge patchwork of leases that Cabot has in the area, and points to the stops.

"A drill pad," he says. "One of our best. Four wellheads on one site. Together they outproduced our entire operation in West Virginia for over a year. Let me get my keys." We're a little late, or the citizens are, I can't tell.

Wait, that can't be right. What he said. "West Virginia?" I ask. "The state? How many wells do you have down there?" I'm thinking it must be some multiple of the four wells on the site he's about to show me — sixteen, maybe twenty-four.

"I don't know offhand," he says. "I'd say it's in the thousands."

"The thousands?" There is so much going on underground that most people don't have a clue about.

He's digging. For his keys. "Welcome to the Marcellus."

Ten years ago, the Marcellus Shale wasn't more than a vaguely notable layer of rock in some upstate New York museum diorama, a remnant of a subset of the Paleozoic Era called the Devonian Period — the sucked-up, dried-out remains of a rich, ancient ocean bottom, now mostly trapped about a mile beneath the surface of the northeastern United States in the form of sedimentary rock that, when freed from the pressure at that depth, emits natural gas, a resource that currently satisfies 25 percent of our national energy demand.

The presumption about the Marcellus Shale was that there wasn't a very effective means of harvesting the gas at the depth where the shale was thickest. Less than ten years ago, the Marcellus natural-gas reserve wasn't counted as a significant domestic natural resource in any calculation. It was as if it didn't exist. Then, with the advent of horizontal fracturing, and with a swiftness borne of America's energy suck, the Marcellus play began to produce natural gas. A great deal of it. Immediately. Rapidly. In outsized ways that reinvented domestic energy supply overnight. As if we woke up one morning with an accessible, Saudi-sized gas play beneath much of the East Coast of the United States.

The Marcellus Shale is a gold rush right now, peopled by opportunists and skeptics, environmental warriors and scientific explorers, waitresses with signs in their yards and farmers stung by drought and recession who can now smell money beneath their soil, lying hucksters and embellishing straight shooters, the ignorant and the informed, the celebrity and the politician, rich weekenders and workingmen, all of them with some stake in this, some simply wanting to make money, others looking to put an end to burning energy at this very juncture in history. A gold rush can feel like a carnival, with dark corners and illusions, with joy and dizziness bound up in one another, and the carney's promise that this will either be the best or the worst night of your life.

Oilmen call it a play. As in the undertaking of an endeavor, as in taking a shot, sticking a pipe in the ground and seeing what you get. A play works in stages. "When we enter the play, we have to lease the land, begin seismic research, drill test wells," says desRosiers. "We look at the state of the play, at the data that's already there — documented geological structures, existing wells. After we're satisfied that we know enough, we start developing the play."

Entering a play? A decision. It might take years, but in Montrose, where the Marcellus play is producing at an unprecedented rate, it generally takes no time at all. Developing the play? That's just the work of it. Constructing the pad. Drilling. Fracking. Work. It's just a matter of a few weeks.

And the word is frac'ing, not fracking. But people use both to describe what Cabot Oil & Gas and other companies do, the sort of work that makes people in northeast Pennsylvania and the southern tier of New York litter their yards with placarded declarations for one side or the other. The single issue that a proponent or opponent might cling to — "Don't mess with my drinking water," say, or "Jobs matter" — is often more than enough reason to stick a sign on a pole, jam that into their yard, a harsh and righteous little roadside attraction dotting the increasingly weird Marcellus landscape.

Oil companies promise jobs, energy, and money. That much is a lock. The opposition contends the entire process is an obscenely clever intrusion on the environment by a vilified industry callous since the start as to its own impact on the planet. That much is a lock, too. As for those leasing their land or wishing they could, or those with worries about their water or animals or the view from their living room, what they seem to know best is often what they were told by the people who share their motivations and prejudices, like liberals getting their news from The Daily Show.

Many of the contractors for Cabot — cadres of oilmen, drillers, and frackers thundering around in eight-axle trucks — seem puzzled by the tightly meshed, extra-small farm settlements of the ancient commonwealth. "I've never been anywhere like it," says Jerry Dugas, Cabot's superintendent of drilling. "People really watch each other's business. I've been all over the world chasing oil, but no one — just no one — gets riled up like these folks. Doesn't mean they aren't kind. Or friendly. They are. Doesn't mean the landowners won't make a lot of money. They will. It just means everything works much slower. And the shale wants to play fast."

Contractors often differentiate between those who grew up here and the weekenders. These same men, having driven into the area and taken up most every motel room in the county — men from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana — unironically call the absentee owners carpetbaggers. They believe the weekend owners — many of whom they identify as celebrities, such as Debra Winger (who has in fact been a resident of nearby Sullivan County, New York, for more than twenty years) and vocal antifracker Mark Ruffalo (who owns a farm nearby, also in New York) — drive a hyperbolically panicked awareness of the issue. "Ruffalo has a gas stove," one told me, as if the fact of his utility configuration were a real scale-tipper. "He uses gas heating. It's public record." This turns out to be untrue, but it is the kind of thing people say. Antifrackers similarly repeat that the oil industry is peopled by outsiders, by industry shills, by complete liars.

This is how it goes. Facts are twisted, and belief replaces discourse.

On the way to meet the landowner folks from the Delaware River Basin at the fracking site, desRosiers and I pass through Montrose proper. The little city thrives — storefronts without vacancy, broad streets with extra-wide parking slots, enough people walking the sidewalks that it feels a smidge like a holiday.

From my seat in desRosiers's truck, stopped at a light, I can see three boys wearing matching green T-shirts. I can make out only part of them, but I know what they say, because the shirts are ubiquitous around here: SUSQUEHANNA COUNTY: LIGHTING OUR WATER ON FIRE SINCE 1795. It's a reference to the claims of methane in the drinking water in nearby townships like Dimock, where so far thirty-two households have agreed to an undisclosed settlement after suing Cabot Oil. One claim being: Fracking has allowed so much methane into my water supply that I can now light it on fire, similar to the scene in the 2010 documentary Gasland, in which a Colorado man dramatically lights his tap water afire, alleging it to be the consequence of nearby fracking. Cabot officials consider the suit largely over and the claim debunked after an investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency found the methane in the Dimock water to be treatable and the water itself drinkable. Evidence also emerged that the faucet in Gasland emitted naturally occurring biogenic methane. The green T-shirts are a proud mind-your-own-business brag: Relax, we've been lighting the goddamn water since I was a kid.

Pennsylvania on a summer's day: the sun a brilliant disk, the air without temperature, neutral as a pencil drawing of the moment but degraded with the smell of barbecue sauce. Days like this make industry look like God's work. God's deafening labor, plotzed broadly on the top of a hill, in full sight of the world, a little less than half a mile from the landowner's house, in a field gone fallow years ago.

In the first stages of the play, things are loud. The gearing of trucks: back and forth carrying pipe. The generators. The derrick. The clattering of pipes. The drilling. Loud. Loud on site. Loud on the road coming in. Loud at half a mile. Loud enough that when on the drill pad, just seventy-five yards from the drill rig, I have to shout, "No, no thank you, no," when, bizarrely, somebody offers me a plate of barbecued ribs.

The ribs came off a half-barrel grill full of hot coals over there on the grass, fresh off the hitch of a big pickup, rolled in by a local contractor. The meal is a gift from one contractor to another. There's a lot of contractor-to-contractor love on the Montrose play. Everyone on the drill site — which will later become the fracking site, then the well itself — is a contractor for one operation or another. It often feels like a reunion.

The site is full of warnings. DO NOT PASS THIS POINT. HARDHATS ONLY.One trailer declares itself the property of Halliburton. NO ADMITTANCE.Warnings all. The operation looks just like oil drilling, the derrick lifting each thirty-three-foot section of pipe toward the waiting hands of a driller, who positions it to be spun into the section of pipe below it. Just now, they're into the bend of the shaft. Each section of pipe is angled 2 or 3 degrees so that after enough of them are put together, the shaft will bend 90 degrees, then it will go horizontal.

DesRosiers taps me on the shoulder and introduces me to someone he calls "the company man." There's a name, but I can't hear it. The company man is the drilling site supervisor. This is a tall, craggy guy probably in his late fifties who looks like some breathing, oversized Walker Evans photograph, an illustration of the hard life. Huge. He stands with his arms crossed, looking straight out over the top of my head at the progress of the drill. His face is in shadow, smudged, and leathery from too much sun. These guys, I've been told, are pure oilmen, brought in because of their experience on drill sites all over the world.

The barbecue smoke shifts, blows right at us.

"You from Texas?" I say, figuring to make a little chitchat.

He makes a face then, just a little one, a shift of the corner of the right side of his lips. But when he speaks, he is shouting, so everyone can hear him dress me down. "Hell, no," he says. "The only time I ever lived in Texas, I lived in the middle, so every time I left my house, it was like I was driving out of there." This gets laughs from the oil minions behind him.

Dumb question, I admit. "Where are you from?"

"I'm from a little place called Lake Charles, Louisiana."

So, thirty miles from Texas. "So what's your thinking on fracking?" I ask.

He shrugs. "I don't think about it. I just do the drilling, then I go home."

"You think it's safe?"

"I just drill," he says. "What they do with it then is their business."

No eye contact as we talk. The company man never stops staring at the rig. I don't think the guy even sees me standing in front of his work.

At Cabot they have roasted the whole question of fracking into simple, easy-to-memorize answers. The ingredients in fracking fluid, for instance, are ticked off using only the five fingers on one of desRosiers's meaty hands. "There are five basic components to fracking fluid," he says. "Water and sand. That's 99 percent of it." Every time fracking fluid is mentioned in the next three days, desRosiers begins with the reminder that it's 99 percent water and sand.

"Beyond that, in the remaining 1 percent, there's a surfactant, which we use to make the water slippery. Basically, that's a dishwashing liquid." From this point forward, whenever I use the word surfactant in any sort of question, desRosiers begins his reply with "The dishwashing liquid?"

The fourth component is a biocide, employed to eliminate any naturally occurring bacteria. "That's your chlorine," desRosiers says. "Like in swimming pools." Your chlorine.

The fifth component is an acid — Cabot uses hydrochloric acid. When he first sounds the word out of his mouth, it seems the scariest. "It's for the cement. Basically we use that to eliminate the fragments and burrs from where we perforate the casing," he says. For the cement.

Now, I cannot remember the recipe for pancakes. But the contents of fracking fluid stay with me like a song from Sesame Street: 99 percent water and sand. Dishwashing liquid. Your chlorine. And acid for the cement.

At the end, he adds one thing. He figures he should mention the scale inhibitor, an additive that prevents mineral buildup in the pipe.

So six fingers, I guess.

Heading east, deeper into the Catskills, across the border into New York, where I've heard tell of an antifracker named Bruce Ferguson. There are two sets of truths in this debate. One lives on the well site, in the corporate office, on the futures market. Another on the Internet, in the local bar, in the county hall, or in the living room of a man like Bruce Ferguson.

Up here, the antifracking sentiment has solidly taken root. Down one state highway, two county roads, and a gravel offshoot, passing fewer homes with each mile that ticks by, in a town called Callicoon Center, I find Ferguson's house. It's just a couple of hours from the hubbub of Montrose, but this is a place where the air is so quiet it seems to push on my ears when I get out of the car. It stuns me a little after my days in Montrose, where the tanker trucks are often packed cheek by jowl on what were once sleepy country roads, and the drilling, even the persistent hiss of the standing wells, presents a constant background level of sheer alien noise. At first, I think it's some kind of headache, this lack of noise, so I root around in the car until I find Advil, and when I stand to loosen the top, Ferguson has appeared at the top landing of his outdoor stairs like a bird.

He is a balloon of calm, Ferguson. Scruffy but somehow elegant, a little gentler than the bunch at Cabot, he is an active member of the Catskills Citizens for Safe Energy, toiling here in the deep hinters of the Catskills. No one at Cabot wants to hear that I'm consulting him. They as much as urge me not to. It's not hard to see why. In a month of driving this way and that across the Marcellus, Ferguson is the most focused person I meet. He brings me into his home — semimodern, open floor plan with a loft, lots of glass — asks where I've been and what I've seen. Seeing is never the point with fracking, though. You can't see shit. Believing is. I give him the run of it. From southwestern Pennsylvania, where the gas drawn from the ground is called "wet gas" — the traditional gas product of the region, which requires transportation for processing — to the first oil well in the United States in Titusville, Pennsylvania, to the active fracking sites in the northeast of the state, which produce "dry gas," available straight to market, with minimal treatment.

Ferguson, retired from a career in television news, questions everything. "Market? The question is, where is the market?" he says. "There is no domestic demand for as much natural gas as these guys want to produce. Outproducing demand, a classic model for corporate failure — and leaving who, exactly, to look after their abandoned wells? They've cratered the price of gas, their companies are listing financially, and instead of using gas to meet this mythic domestic market, they want to flip us around into becoming the world's biggest exporters." He sighs, frustrated by the patterns he sees so clearly, or by the need to explain to those who cannot yet see. In the large open kitchen, he hits the faucet. "Now we're building export stations. The whole domestic-demand question is just a lie. They're trying to produce an export market where none existed before."

To where?

"China," he says. A vital export to China. Imagine. But the benefits of this seem to elude him.

Chris Buck

Hydraulic fracturing — essentially forcing water and other material into rock to extract gas — is more prevalent than many Americans know. Figures shown include traditional vertical wells as well as the controversial horizontal wells, which go straight down, very deep, and then sideways. (See diagram below.)

Ferguson brings me a glass of water, rolls out the studies on his laptop, references the work of scientists at Cornell, warning me about other faculty members who work for the industry. Everyone, on both sides, wants you to talk to the scientists they treat like expert witnesses in the public trial of fracking.

When I bring up contamination, he says he is certain the industry is paying for silence on the matter through financial settlements of emergent lawsuits. "Nondisclosure agreements silence many of the victims after they settle. It's a cancer. The question isn't what is the industry lying about. The question is what do we know, and what do we not know? There are many forms of contamination. And we have no idea what condition the water will be in in twenty years. Their losses pile up. Degraded air, degraded soil, degraded water..."

Ferguson knows many of the cast of characters I've spoken to in the industry, calling them "a bunch of liars." Forty-five minutes after my arrival, he's shedding calmness like dried skin. There's a roiled outrage underneath his phrasing that makes him sound both exhausted and sad. He turns to the Internet again and again, calling up his group's Web site, and flustered by the urge to speak at the same time, promises to send me the proper links when he locates them. He grows agitated. "I once sat in a meeting between representatives from Chesapeake Energy and a group of farmers who were about to sell their land rights for $2,000 an acre. And when it came time to sign, one of the farmers said, 'Okay, I'll find a lawyer to look at this,' and the Chesapeake guy bellows, 'You don't need a lawyer!' We have records showing that this is a very typical industrial trick. Pages are switched in documentation, people are intimidated, lied to. And these guys just keep leaving behind the mess."

He gets up, looking for a copy of a study, or a Web address he's written on a scrap of paper somewhere, rolling through his e-mails to find a study that refutes one claim, then another. Finally, he stops and lays four fingers on his dinner table calmly. "This thing is so broad. It's about technology, science, natural resources, geology, property law, tourism, education, water safety, energy security. There's nothing it doesn't touch." He tells me who I should contact, who I should speak to, the articles I should note on the Web site — there are hundreds of links there. He believes his case is unassailable.

"We're happy to disarm every side of every one of their arguments. We win every argument. Every one. Energy security? We win. Greenhouse gases? Natural gas is worse than coal or oil. Worse." Then he points me to the study he was looking for, cited in an article posted on the site, which he assures me will clarify that point.

Chris Buck

First, a well is drilled vertically to a depth table until it hits shale that contains natural gas. Then it takes a left or right turn and can continue for thousands of feet. Next, a huge volume of water, sand, and diluted chemicals is shot through the pipe with enough force to create cracks in the shale, freeing the gas. The gas is released through the cracks and is drawn up through the pipe to the surface, often for years afterward. It is processed and sent to your home so you can cook eggs and turn on the heat. Flowback — some of the used injection fluid, which contains diluted chemicals and some recovered metals — returns to the surface after the fracking is completed and throughout the life of the well. It is recycled and reused or injected back into the ground.

"The thing about natural gas is that it's far cleaner than coal."

That's Bill desRosiers's cheery declaration two days after my adventure into Ferguson's woods. "When you burn natural gas, there are two by-products. One of them is water. And that's just a good thing."

The other? "Carbon dioxide," he says. "But there's none of the other stuff that coal puts into the air. Like mercury. None of that. And there's none of the costs of refining. The transportation, the processing." He e-mails me an impact chart comparing the output of natural gas with that of coal. He also tells me who I can call to back up that assertion.

But of course, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. DesRosiers narrows his eyes. He does not believe global warming is caused by the activity of human beings, he says. He states carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas. Everywhere I go in Montrose, from the fairgrounds to the local lunch place to the drill site itself, it's hard to find anyone who's willing to allow that climate change is real, let alone man-made.

It's a looking glass — from state to state, from one camp to another, one mountain range to the next.

I tell desRosiers that I'd like to follow a fracker, but Cabot balks at this part of the request. Instead, the fracker comes to me for a conversation over a folding table in a Cabot field office. He is in the form of Larry Fulmer, a strong-shouldered lump of a guy with long slate-gray hair and rimless glasses. I regard him immediately as a kind of wizard. He's soft-spoken, so it's easy to think of him as gentle. Fulmer's an oilman, though, the completion superintendent. The overseer. Thirty-five years in the business, he's been in Montrose since the Marcellus play began, lived in the same hotel room in nearby Tunkhannock for four years, evidence of his faith in the strength of the play. Fulmer can't leave, nor does he want to. "I put my

own furniture in my hotel room," he says. "I haven't been home to West Virginia for more than a week in four years."

So would they actually call you a fracker?

He looks at me, tilting his head back a little to get me in the window of his glasses. "You know how to spell it right, don't you?"

I do, but he reminds me anyway.

So are you actually the frac'er?

"Completions," he says. Initially, the questions scratch at Fulmer. There's so much misunderstanding of the frac'ing process that he's answered everything a dozen times. And then people go to the Internet for the answers they really want. "I do completions, which is from before the frac'ing until we turn the site over for collection."

The fracker. You're the frac'er.

"I'm in the trailer during the fracturing process," he says. "I monitor every minute I can, act as a go-between from the site to the Cabot office in Pittsburgh."

Can I watch you do it?

He pinches his face a little. I could, he says, if Cabot had an active frac'ing operation that week. Then he thinks again. "Cabot would have to sign off on that even so," he says.

Every stage of the fracking process works a little differently for every company. Every water-pressure reading, every valve gauge, is telling. The readings, settings, and mixtures are not broadcast. If there is a cloak of secrecy to the operation, it is drawn over this part. Digits. Flow meters. Compression readings.

What do you see in the black of the earth?

Fulmer says he can watch the progress of each fracture.

So you turn a knob and you control the path of the fractures?

This earns a tired, silly-question headshake. "No," he says. "I can't control their shape. But I can see how far they go, and I can control where they stop. You want the fractures to stay inside the shale itself, since that will release pressure and allow the gas to escape into the pipe."

Do you guys vent methane during the process?

He purses his lips. Not because this is another secret. Because he's answered it before, and the answer is broad. "During the drilling process, they'll hit pockets of naturally occurring methane at the shallower depths. They flare it off," he says. They burn it.

And does methane vent freely through the life of the well?

Fulmer won't answer this one. He can't. He only supervises the fracking process. But he still seems annoyed. "What you have to understand is that methane is natural gas. That's what Cabot is putting in the pipeline, so why would they vent off a product they are spending money to collect?"

What about accidents? The spillage of flowback?

Fulmer isn't vague. "This is the oil industry. It's dangerous work. There is risk. Accidents, spills. Yes. But that costs money. A lot of money. Cabot doesn't want spills, because of the cost. We document all of them, we deal with them. It's the same with all drill sites everywhere. These things are not gardens. They're drill pads. It's an industry, even out here in the country."

We move from the Cabot field offices to lunch at a restaurant in Montrose. Fulmer slowly loosens up, and what seemed like annoyance shifts to a kind of enthusiasm for the business. "In most drilling situations, the product is property of the company I'm working for. They profit, which is fine with me. That means I'm doing my job." Fulmer pauses. "Up to now, or I should say most of the time, I just don't ever get to see that money at work. What I like about being here is that I sometimes get to see that money going into the pockets of the people who live here. Hospitals. Schools. It changes things for them. That I enjoy."

In a hotel in Binghamton, New York, just across the border from Montrose, I watch Mark Ruffalo, the actor who recently played the Incredible Hulk in The Avengers, speaking on Bill Maher's HBO pulpit about fracking. He hits the talking points. He calls oil and gas efforts an unregulated industry that uses the tactics of "the cigarette industry" to hoodwink the public. My guess is he's heard the five-components-of-fracking-fluid jingle.

When I asked George Stark, the public-communications director at Cabot, if he feels that his is an unregulated, or even underregulated, industry, he smiled, allowing that this might be the crux of a real debate somewhere. "We're trying to stay ahead of the regulations," he said. "We triple-line our drill pads, we recycle our flowback, reuse the water that comes of that. Of course I wouldn't say it's underregulated, but we understand how regulations progress. Our success in Montrose is such that our business plan is set up so we can stay ahead of it."

"Underregulated?" Bill desRosiers says when I ask him while sitting in the front seat of his truck, on the way to a tour of the water-treatment facility. "I can show you fifty-some different permits we have to have for each site before we can break the surface. And that's nothing compared to our safety requirements. If anything spills on the site, we have to file a report and sometimes halt operations. And by anything I mean anything. If someone spills a Mountain Dew, we have to file a report."

"So you have a Mountain Dew protocol?" I ask.

"I guess so," he says. "Yes."

"Is that just for big sugary drinks?"

"It's for anything that spills," he says. "Anything."

Chris Buck

Bruce Ferguson is a vocal member of the Catskills Citizens for Safe Energy, an antifracking group. He will show you as many articles and studies supporting his case as you have time to look at. "We win every argument," he says.

Curt Coccodrilli is a fourth-generation citizen of the Delaware River Basin, maker of homemade sausage, hunter, forty-seven-year-old father to a new baby, and a guy who just wants to frack what he owns. He lives in a big house, well tended, built by his father on land bought by his great-grandfather. There's a large pond, or small lake, below the garage he takes me to after we drive to his land. His ancient dog follows. One of his three remaining free-range chickens steps aside to let us pass. "The chickens don't last long out here," he says. "But they try. She lays eggs in all the high places she can get to."

Coccodrilli wants to show me a picture of his father, who once owned this land that Curt wants to lease to Hess Corporation for the purposes of fracking. And a picture of his grandfather, who was a coal miner and labor organizer the generation before. After that he wants to take me to that land, to walk the swath of power lines that cuts across it thanks to eminent domain, paying him nothing. He wants to point to the wind farm in the distance, once the largest in Pennsylvania, and note the proximity to an anthracite coal mine, the kind that dot the land across the region. "The power lines are a fact of life for me," he says. "I accept them. They're on my land, but the power company sprays like crazy to keep the growth down, and that just means all kinds of poison on my land that I have no control over. They can do what they need to, on my land, but I can't do what I want. I own the land, and the real point is I own what's beneath it. But I can't frack it, just because the question is on everyone's radar." He rocks on the balls of his feet and squints at the distance a lot, a big man who looks like he might tip over at times.

"This is energy country," he says. "We've been through this before, more than a few times. I mean, coal. Come on. My people made it on coal, and I know there was some real cost to that. There still is. My family knows that. The land shows it."

He stands in the garage, puts his finger on the image of his grandfather standing amongst rows of miners in a black-and-white company photograph. "He was a labor organizer," Coccodrilli says. "He had some fight in him." Otherwise the garage is a museum of hunting trophies and concert souvenirs from Coccodrilli's business career as a producer of promotional material for rock tours. The walls are layered in dozens of signed posters, napkins, photographs filled with thanks and good wishes from Carlos Santana and Lyle Lovett and Bonnie Raitt.

"Bonnie stopped working with me because of fracking," he says. "Apparently she saw where I was arguing land rights in the paper. Or she became aware of it. Next thing I know, I get a letter from her manager, saying they can't work with me anymore because I'm an advocate of fracking. Freaking Bonnie Raitt, you know?" He fastens his lips tightly and shakes his head, stung even now, though he shrugged it off months ago. "But here I am, a private citizen, arguing for the use of my land in a public hearing," he says. "I own those mineral rights. Nobody cared when they were no use to me." He holds his palms out and up. What can he do?

Later, in the kitchen, his brother Chuck, wheelchair bound and recovering from a fever, tells me, "The question goes beyond use. Use is merely necessity. I believe the real use of this gas is to keep us from sending our children to war for oil."

Cabot has had a picnic for the community for the last three years. The parking lot is a green field facing a range of hillocks called the Endless Mountains. In the midmorning they are blue, by late afternoon dark green. In between, the parking field slowly fills, trucks mostly, from which entire families climb, limbs unfolding like children's strollers in the firm grass. Cliques of people converge on the picnic site as if in slow motion.

Depending on your perspective, the event is either a chance to ask frequently asked questions directly to the engineers and scientists who work for Cabot and their contractors, or it's a county fair built on greed. There's no music: The place is too chatty. There's a serviceable set of children's games — balls, circles, targets — but most everyone cruises right past them. The primary tent is set up with displays of each stage of the operation, with Cabot men and women stationed there, pressing everyone to ask every question they have. How will you protect my wells? What happens when the well is finished? How thick are these casings? How deep do they run? The cheery staff of scientists and contracting supervisors gives out tectonics lessons, statistics, geological maps, fragments of the Marcellus, nuggets of fool's gold, pocketknives, beer cozies, key chains, mesh hats. They are drunk with explanations. Visit every station, glance at every stage of the process, and they stamp your entry for a giveaway for a bike.

Everyone there — and there are no protesters in sight — pretty much wants to know their end. When do you start on my land? What can I expect from the drill site near my place? When do you rebuild my road? People want to know how it works. For them. They want to know when it starts. For them. Because for them, those who own the land that holds the gas, all of this feels inevitable. The gas is under here. So get it out.

A completed well site, after the frack, looks pretty much like what it is: a small utility installation set in the middle of a meadow. There's a chain-link fence, and warning signs, and a gravel access road. The hissing sound of gas being collected and sent to the connected pipeline is audible at a hundred yards. Industry literature says that a completed well site takes up about two acres of land, though it's hard to make that much out. The industry likes to point out how much the site shrinks, and in this regard, anyway, it is not exaggerating.

Still, you could say it looks like shit out here on the landscape — the steel, the well caps, the meters, the pipes, the gravel pad, all of it projecting into the natural world — and you'd be in the right. We love old barns, deserted, crumbling, unpainted bastions of industry from another era, but we'll never look at well sites as anything but a heavy industrial trespass.

These wells proceed vertically past the groundwater and beneath the brine water below that. This part of the operation, the vertical shaft, features several layers of steel and cement. The shaft then makes the long, slow right turn into the shale bed, 2 or 3 degrees at a time.

Once the drill shaft is finished, the fracker works in two-hundred-foot stages from the end of the pipe backward. The fracking fluid is forced into the line with the help of surfactant (dish soap!), then through holes in the casing. Cracks form in the surrounding shale, and sand slides in to keep the fractures open so the gas can escape. A biocide in the water (your chlorine) keeps bacteria from growing into the cracks, and whatever gas is present pushes the fracking fluid back up. This is called flowback. Typically 20 percent of the original injection is collected in the first two weeks of fracking. Depending on your source, another 20 percent of the remaining fluid may return to the surface during the life of the well in the form of vapor or droplets. This leaves around 60 percent of the original fluid underground, an amount that may, depending on the length of the well, top three million gallons.

The capture and disposal of flowback is the essential element of a safe well site. "The biggest issue with fracking fluid is the contamination from spills at the surface," says Sam Gowan, recent past president of the American Institute of Professional Geologists. What comes back up with the used fluid is most worrisome. Heavy metals such as barium, radium, and arsenic are often present, as are other toxic compounds such as benzene. Now, this stuff is nothing like pool water. More like poison mud. "The biggest danger is the corrosive salt in that water. A tanker spill that got into the groundwater could ruin a well for a considerable period of time. Half a generation or more."

What about the fluid itself? Are the chemicals present at levels high enough to be a danger? Gowan doesn't think so. "These are very diluted presences." Would he drink a glass of it? He pauses. "No, I don't suppose I would. But I wouldn't drink pool water, either. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop swimming."

Still, what's ugliest about flowback is not so much where it comes from as where it goes. Although Cabot is working locally to recycle and reuse the fluid, disposing of the heavy metals, much of the industry still uses underground injection wells to push the used — treated, yes, but still used — fracking fluid back into the ground. It sounds pretty awful: pull poison from the ground in one state, try to clean it up a little, inject it back into the ground in another. But it is legal. It is age-old.

And fracking fluid is hardly the first poison to be injected into the earth. It's a mere fraction of the total. There are more than 600,000 EPA-monitored injection wells in the U. S., about 170,000 of which are classified to store flowback. Injection wells have been used since the 1930s to push industrial waste to depths of 8,000 feet or more. These wells have been used to inject more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic waste into the earth: acid wastewaters, airport deicing fluids, ammonia, caustic wastewaters, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, brines, salt solutions, chemical manufacturing wastewaters, metal plating and galvanizing solutions, waste pickle-liquor acids, and more. If the operator of a well runs it with the pressure too high, or the volume of injection too high, or if he has the bad luck to be drilling into a weak fault line, seismic activity is sometimes triggered. So while it is plenty fair to question what and how much we push deep underground with the approval of the federal government (and a few groups are beginning to), it is highly inaccurate to suggest, as some have, that a poorly run injection-well process involving fracking flowback is evidence that "fracking causes earthquakes."

Injection wells caused those earthquakes. And to keep going the way we have been, whether we frack or not — but especially if we do — we're going to keep building injection wells. Sucks.

Like it or not, these wells are the last ticks of the hammering pulse of a market that begins in my house, in my kitchen, with the clicking pilot of the faulty center burner on my overpriced DeLonghi stove. I'm a user. A burner. This I know. We all are.

You will get fracked. You have been fracked. You will be fracked again.

We break the earth. For energy, for water, for resources. Coal. Oil. Gas. Silver. Gold. Salt. Even chalk. We break the earth for all of these things. We always have.

You can fight it. But righteous insistence never wins out over discovery and invention. As applied in the Marcellus Shale, gas fracking represents both. The hunger for burnable energy hasn't decreased significantly. That hunger will push the technique forward, the practice northward, where it will be examined again. That examination will lead not to the banning of gas fracking but to its improvement.

It will happen under your feet, if not under your land. Extraction techniques will continue to improve. A discovery like the Marcellus opens up smaller shale beds all over the world for more and safer fracking techniques. The fact of spills, the likelihood of accidents, and the cost of disposal are simply that — facts, likelihood, costs. These too have happened, and will happen again. Teenagers dump used motor oil directly into the dirt behind the garage. Homeowners pour gallons of bleach into their wells to "shock" them. Tenant farmers drain used heating oil into creeks. Oil companies have done worse. Our negligence as human beings does not mean that negligence must, or will, win out.

We will break the earth to save ourselves. We always have.

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