PR Aspects of Shale: “Reality of the Moment”

One “Champagne Discussion Roundtable” at the Unconventional Gas and Oil Summit in Warsaw, Poland led to an effervescent discussion: “Examining the PR Aspects of Shale, Exploring the case for NIMBY.”

The session was led by Intercultural Strategy Consultant Dr. Photini Pappas of Wisdom in Action International.

She noted that public opinion had been a decisive factor in the future of shale gas development in Europe. Dr. Pappas asked participants sitting at the round table how they saw the present role of public opinion in Europe and prompted them to offer strategies for the way forward in developing unconventional gas in Europe.

“Public opinion is going to be a crucial part of the shale gas story in Europe,” said Chatham House’s Prof. Paul Stevens. “The fact that we have developed an organization in the UK called ‘Frack Off’ says it all, to be perfectly honest. It’s a major issue and the support that they’re garnering is absolutely incredible. Part of the reason I suspect is the recession and the lack of funding for NGOs, they need to find a sort of crusade to try and raise revenues. The whole shale gas operation is a gift for this – they’ve latched onto this to the nth degree.

“Plus the fact that the industry itself is its own worst enemy. They don’t seem to have a clue how to deal with public relations, they shoot themselves in the foot every other day. You have to ask yourself ‘Why the moratorium in France, Bulgaria?’ etc. etc. It’s because public opinion is there and the UK government’s sort of hanging on in there by the skin of its teeth, coming under huge pressure to follow the example of the French.”

Fivos Spathopoulos, Consultant Unconventional Shale Exploration & Visiting Lecturer in Petroleum Geology at Imperial College London, said he was surprised the not in my back yard (“nimby”) principle also applied to renewable energy projects as well.

“A few years ago in the UK they said only 60 turbines would be necessary to provide domestic electricity for 1 million inhabitants in which case for the whole population in Britain they need 3,600; are they going to put them all offshore? Where? If not an environmental problem in the North Sea then at least for navigation,” he said.

Another participant pointed out the noise created by wind turbines as well as the massacre of birds.

Mr. Spathopoulos said, “There’s an argument that all the developed countries have been spoiled by having all the energy they need.”

“I think there’s a problem that we have been spoiled in some way with reserves of gas and oil and have taken it for granted,” said Environmental Chemist Stefan Jansen of Deltares. “Now we are getting into a phase where we are dealing with the consequences.”

Participant Michael Wyne said: “You could choose not to live next to a big, smoky coal-fired power station; you could choose not to live next to a nuclear power station – you knew where they were, whereas nowadays you can choose somewhere nice and green and pleasant and the next year someone wants to put 20 turbines over your back garden.”

“Last year the German government said they would subsidize German companies for solar panels, but not in Germany, because there is no sun,” recalled Fivos Spathopoulos. “But if you go to Greece, which is a depressed economy, you can have solar panels there and send the electricity back to Germany.”

“The Greeks are welcoming this in the hard economic struggle,” added Dr. Pappas.

She continued: “I have a feeling we are waking up to a new reality, because in the past I suppose the key conflicts we knew like corporate capitalism on the one hand, the labor movement and working classes on the other. All of a sudden we have corporations waking up to the fact that it’s the middle classes who are now opposing their activities, and I think shale gas is a very interesting case in point, which have to do with post materialist values: quality of life, clean environment, how to leave this environment safe and clean for our children – these arguments come up often in the anti shale gas blogs.”

Someone asked: “Are those same people saying ‘I’m prepared to live with less energy’?”

“The discussions that I’ve been in – they’re perfectly fine with environmental damage in Russia,” said Udo Edelman, Managing Director, OneMarcellus. “As long as it’s faraway. The argument in Germany is ‘We have all the gas we need. There’s enough gas, we don’t need to develop our resource.’”

Paul Stevens added: “When I asked my friends from Germany where they were going to get their power if they shut down nuclear and they said they’d import it from France.”

“It’s a daunting task to think that somehow we will be reducing energy demand,” said a participant named Jeffrey Sundquist. “Even if you look at the developed world cutting back significantly, the growth in the developing world is going to far outpace any savings, so where is that coming from?”

“We’re at 87 billion barrels a day currently, globally there are other places that are trying to bring alternative energy onstream, but the alternative energy does not have the economics. There are economies of scale in legacy energy, so there’s no ability or willingness to pay for new energy – these are diametrically opposed. You’ve got increasing demand, unaffordable new energy, austerity measures, no ability to pay by the consumer…somebody has to pay for this. Who is it?”

Michael Wyne asked if nimby-ism wasn’t a function of education.

“We live in an information age. People can go and find what they want very quickly and if we as an energy industry are not open about what we’re doing. ExxonMobil realized that one of the best things they could do was to put up a freely searchable map-based interface of their shale gas operations, so you can click on a well and see exactly the constituents of the proppant – it’s all in there.

“Once you give people the ability to gain access to information they perceive as reliable,” he continued, “they can begin to educate themselves maybe away from that nimby-ism. If you keep that quiet, then those that have formed opinions that are putting them freely out on the web take the upper hand.”

Mr. Spathopoulos expressed that the issue in France regarding the hydraulic fracturing ban was not environmentalism but a traditional way of life they sought to protect. “Jose Bove and others don’t talk about the environment, they have 85% nuclear power anyway, but they want to keep their traditional way of life.”

Participants talked about “mobile activism” when it appeared that protesters were not actually from the place where they were demonstrating against something. Paul Stevens mentioned that online social networks had allegedly driven recent uprisings in the Middle East.

Stefan Jansen piped in: “I think the industry simply has to deal with that – it’s the reality of the moment. On the one hand, people are really informed, because of the internet, but on the other they aren’t able to place it in the right context.”