Public worries about the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling could harm the future of the industry, executives said at a conference in Houston on Wednesday.
Natural gas companies need to work on public image to dispel fears of water contamination, said Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources. Reports from The New York Times and the Oscar-nominated documentary film "Gasland" have linked companies to the polluting of water resources. They point to the process of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," the method used to free natural gas from rocks underground, as the source of the contamination.
Skepticism is especially high in the Northeast, where the Marcellus Shale formation is attracting natural gas producers to an area whose residents are not used to seeing drilling rigs.
"I think the bulk of that is happening in states like Pennsylvania and New York, where the amount of drilling growth is something they haven't seen before and the system is not really set up to handle the volume of activity from the public's perspective," said Stacy Schusterman, CEO of Samson Investment.
The industry is also working to convince ratepayers that natural gas is a reliable source of energy and not prone to volatility, as some believe.
"The message is just getting out there that there is a lot of supply," said Guy Buckley, a vice president of corporate development at Spectra Energy, a natural gas pipeline and storage company.
At about $4 per million British thermal units, prices of natural gas energy are low. But utilities are reluctant to commit, worried that prices will eventually rise.
"You've got to change some of these big decisionmakers like power generators, and those decisions will get made as they become more secure that the shale gale is real, it's here and that prices are reasonable," Buckley said (Jennifer Dlouhy, Houston Chronicle, March 10). -- TS
