Bursting their bubble

As soon as the Rolling Stone article hit the street, the standard responses from the industry started rolling in. 

We've seen it before. 

What's different about this "news"?  The Rolling Stone chose to answer back.  Point by point.  Read the entire article.  The closing is not to be missed.  Bravo.

Keep on rockin'.

The company entirely dodges the article’s central point: that Chesapeake is highly-leveraged firm operated by a corporate gambler who engaged in complex scheme to profit off the illusion that America has a virtually unlimited supply of cheap natural gas.
But when it came time to answer more substantial questions, all traces of transparency vanished. A quick example: I asked Chesapeake three times to provide me with a statistic for the total volume of dirty flowback water the company handled in the Marcellus Shale region last year. I got no answer.

Even more disturbing, when I asked McClendon directly if he or his company had contributed any money to presidential candidates or their PACs during the current campaign, he said flatly that they had not. This was curious to me, because McClendon has a long history of making campaign donations, and often encourages others in the industry to give to PACs as a way to make sure their voices are heard.   So I asked him again in email a few days later: The answer was still "no." A week later, a researcher at Rolling Stone discovered that Chesapeake had indeed contributed $250,000 to Rick Perry's campaign last fall. When I asked Kehs about this, he admitted it was true. Apparently McClendon operates in a world where a quarter million dollar campaign contribution can just slip one’s mind. 

"Inaccurate and Misleading"

No we're not referring to our politicians or local "news". 

Seconds after the back to back real newspaper articles (New York Times) concerning natural gas drilling might just be the Ponzi scheme many have warned about for years, the drillers started their spin.  Yeah, no one saw that coming.

Gas drilling companies called the information (which came from industry insider emails) "inaccurate and misleading".  Isn't that what the Times articles said about their propaganda, just in a more professional way?

As usual, local "news" jumped on the spin wagon. 

Here's a copy of what a local concerned citizen sent to the local paper.  Since you won't see the letter in the paper, we'll share it here.  Think they'll get a response?

You might tell your friends in the business that people are wary of propaganda pieces like this one masquerading as news. If Aubrey wants to put forward something that people will not consider to be "inaccurate and misleading" hype from the business end of the industry, then they need to get their most credible geophysicist and petroleum engineer to write a piece explaining how refracking can be made to work sufficiently well to keep these wells productive for 30-50 years. Oh, and the article needs to be signed and stamped with a Professional Engineer's seal so that his career is on the line. Also please stop putting out the hype about there being no chance of raw gas invading the aquifers because the fracking is done 7000-8000 feet below the surface and an aquifer is typically only a few hundred feet deep.

That dog won't hunt any longer. Look at any flagstone patio or sidewalk. You've never seen one without cracks. That's what happens in the wellbore at the interfaces between the cement and the casing and between the cement and the rock wall. There's the conduit for transporting the raw gas up the wellbore to the aquifer.

I'd be ashamed to be writing propaganda for CHK. If you want to do that then go to work for them. Hey, they'd even pay you more than the S-T does.