The Ohio Geological Society

FRIDAY, May 18th, 2018

Lunch & Talk begin at 12:00 pm
H. R. Collins Lab and Core Repository
3307 S. Old State Road, Delaware, OH 43015

Lunch Provided for Registered Attendees

RSVP required

The Speaker will be:

Dr. Terry Engelder

Professor Emeritus of Geosciences

The Pennsylvania State University

What Enabled the Global Pushback against Fracking?  A Tale of Two Wells

Rarely have scientific interpretations influenced public perception and concomitantly fed public activism more than the many interpretations of the geological, environmental, and engineering details associated with fracking, particularly in the Appalachian Basin.   Early in his reporting on fracking, Christopher Joyce, science correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), said, “I have been in science journalism for more than 30 years and I have never seen more scientific disinformation on any topic as fracking. I am amazed at the level of both inadvertent and purposeful disinformation.  There is such an agenda on everyone’s mind” (Joyce, 2013).  A decade after fracking hit the Appalachian Basin like a storm, it is time to reexamine some of the data that led to Joyce’s comment and the concomitant global pushback against fracking.

Speaker Bio:  Terry Engelder, a leading authority on the recent Marcellus gas shale play, holds degrees from Penn State B.S. (’68), Yale M.S. (’72) and Texas A&M, Ph.D. (‘73).  He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Geosciences at Penn State and has previously served on the staffs of the US Geological Survey, Texaco, and Columbia University.  He has written 170 research papers, many focused on Appalachia, and a book, the research monograph “Stress Regimes in the Lithosphere”.  His research focus for the past 35 years has been the interaction between earth stress and rock fracture. His work on gas shales first caught industry attention in the late 1970s and industry has engaged him ever since in learning how to recover gas from black shale.   He is currently writing a book for the trade literature, “What were those people thinking?”, based on the reaction of academia, the government, the media and the public over the past decade to fracking in the Appalachian Basin.