WSJ: In Fracking, the Energy Business Gets Neighborly

It isn’t just a radical fringe of Americans who worry about the environment—and energy executives finally seem to have noticed.

A couple of years ago at the energy industry’s massive annual gathering, IHS CERAWeek in Houston, the people who pull oil and natural gas out of the ground were largely dismissive of the public’s concerns about hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

But this year, industry officials are more willing to talk about problems with the technique for getting oil and gas from shale formations, and to discuss how they intend to fix them. The change reflects, in part, a shift in where energy companies are doing their work: Fracking has made thousands of new wells possible, many of them close to population centers instead of the remote oil fields of the past. Listening to neighbors is becoming a must.  MORE