72
Universities Council on Water Resources
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
Issue 147, Pages 72-79, March 2012
Fracking and the Neoliberalization of the
Hydro-Social Cycle in Pennsylvania’s
Marcellus Shale
Michael H. Finewood1 and Laura J. Stroup2
1
Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA ; 2St. Michael’s College, Colchester, VT
Abstract: Oil and gas firms are utilizing a controversial drilling technique, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking,
to access unconventional natural gas reserves in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. The potential impacts of
fracking are creating sharp tensions between stakeholders over the costs and benefits of drilling within their
communities. In particular, much contention has emerged over water resources as the process both uses
and degrades billions of gallons of water. This paper takes a critical look at the way multi-scale neoliberal
discourses obfuscate comprehensive understandings of fracking’s effect on water resources. We turn to
the neoliberal environments literature as a way to situate the economic logic that normalizes the impacts
of fracking on resources, particularly in the absence of an effective regulatory framework. We argue that
neoliberal pro-fracking arguments are (re)defining the relationship among people, the environment, and
institutions, which in turn normalizes the impacts on communities and the resources on which they depend.
Keywords: Fracking, neoliberalism, water
A
s energy and water consumption rise
across human populations, many societies
are experiencing chronic water and energy
vulnerabilities (Wang 2009). This phenomenon
is evident in the growing trend of high volume,
slickwater hydraulic fracturing paired with the
technology of horizontal drilling for natural gas
that is occurring in many regions across the United
States (U.S.). Hydraulic fracturing (also called
fracing, hydrofracking, and heretofore, fracking)
is a drilling technique that improves access to
unconventional natural gas within the miniscule
pores of shale deposits (Soeder 2010).
Public and environmental health concerns about
the natural gas boom have largely surrounded
the fracking process. Fracking is an extraction
technique developed in the late 1940s to access
otherwise inaccessible fuel deposits interbedded
within geologic strata such as coal or shale beds.
Once costly and inefficient, the technique has
experienced a phenomenal surge, contributing to
one of the largest domestic energy booms in U.S.
history (Soeder 2010; Gold 2012). The process
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involves drilling a horizontal well into shale or coal
deposits and then creating a minor earthquake by
injecting large volumes of water (from 1.5 million
gallons to 8 million gallons of water per frack),
sand, proppants, and lubricants into the well.
Each fracking event creates small cracks in shale
deposits, forcing previously inaccessible natural
gas to the surface, and wells can be fracked up
to eighteen times. However, fracking technology
depends heavily on the use of undisclosed types
and amounts of toxic chemicals (Horwitt 2009).
These chemicals, as well as combustion materials
and other gases, are released in the fracking process
and could pose acute and chronic long-term hazards
to public health. Additionally, these substances
may also endanger long-term water and air quality.
In particular, much contention has emerged over
water resources, as the fracking process both uses
and degrades billions of gallons of water, and can
pollute surface and aquifer reserves with methane
and other toxic chemicals (Osborn et al. 2011).
These unknowns, as well as accounts of methanecontaminated drinking water wells in the vicinity
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
Fracking and the Neoliberalization of the Hydro-Social Cycle
of fracking across the country, have forced the EPA
and state environmental agencies to review their
policies related to fracking (Osborn et al. 2011).
The complex energy-water nexus (whereby
energy and water are understood to be inextricably
linked and vital to human welfare (Sehlke 2009))
is made explicit by the process of fracking for
natural gas. The natural gas economy is surging
rapidly (Kusnetz 2011) and is often touted as a
solution for current and future energy demand.
Simultaneously, each fracking well pad requires
billions of gallons of water – laced with toxic
chemicals – to extract shale gas, as well as creating
a need to dispose of the resulting “flowback”
wastewater (Urbina 2011). As research on fracking
develops, however, there is mounting evidence that
communities above targeted shale gas plays are
vulnerable to environmental health risks inherent
to this industrial extraction process (Colborn et
al. forthcoming; Adams 2011; Osborn et al. 2011).
Nonetheless, proponents suggest that current and
future U.S. energy consumption necessitates the
use of this controversial technique and related
water usage (USEIA 2011). Many boosters situate
a defense of fracking in a multi-scalar argument
about national energy needs, energy security,
and possibilities for rural economic growth.
Conversely, as communities are recognizing
the strong connection between fracking and
contaminated water resources, growing contingents
of stakeholders are beginning to raise objections to
gas development in their watershed.
This is bearing out in Pennsylvania’s
Northeastern Tier of the Marcellus Shale gas
play where sharp tensions are emerging between
proponents and opponents of regional fracking
(Maykuth 2010). It is in this context – similar to
places in Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas
– where stakeholders must wade through a diverse
range of narratives regarding the costs and benefits
of fracking, in order to determine whether or not
to allow drilling on their land and within their
communities. Perceptions of the hydro-social
cycle (Heynen et al. 2005; Swyngedouw 2006;
Bakker 2010) are critical to understanding this
decision-making process. The hydro-social cycle
is Swyngedouw’s (2009) conceptualization of the
inextricably linked relationship between water
and society, and likewise, “how hydro-social
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
73
transformations are imbedded in and infused by
class, gender, ethnic, or other power struggles”
(57). In this interlinked socio-ecological hydraulic
process, opponents and proponents seek to define
water resources in differing terms (Hope 2009). On
the one hand, fracking proponents use neoliberal
benefit-cost analysis to construct water as just one
input in a fully economized hydro-social cycle. In
this view, stakeholders must weigh the potential
risks to water against their personal economic
welfare, their communities’ environmental health,
as well as the economic welfare of the nation as
a whole. In contrast, opponents of fracking often
frame a more complex narrative about water. In
this view, not only are local places and associated
resources experiencing social, economic, and
ecological costs that far outweigh the benefits
of natural gas production, stakeholders are (re)
framing the protection of water resources in noneconomic terms, such as a life-giving resource
critical to community values and as a human/nonhuman right (e.g., Hope 2009; Charman 2010).
In the remainder of this paper we consider
the way proponents of fracking discursively
frame water through a neoliberal environments
framework (Heynen et al. 2007), and how this
framing factors into stakeholders’ decision-making
process. We argue that multi-scalar, pro-fracking
narratives serve to obfuscate the drilling process
and normalize impacts on the hydro-social cycle.
This largely occurs through a discursive framing
of natural gas as a green fossil fuel, a solution
for national resource independence and domestic
energy needs, and a generator of local economic
growth. Local social and ecological resources (i.e.
community, sense of place, water as a recreational
source) are situated within this scenario as mere
factors in a broader marketplace of costs and
benefits. In other words, the risks to water are
perhaps a cost, but can be outweighed by the benefits
created by the industrial extraction process. Thus,
following this logic, the values of water quantity
and quality, and by extension stakeholder concerns
for water, are shifted to a fully economized benefitcost analysis. This is also a shift away from a
resource that embodies ecological, cultural, and
other non-economic values (Fletcher 2010, 176),
and whereby locals must sacrifice local resources
for the greater good (Scott 2010).”
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Finewood and Stroup
This paper considers the energy-water nexus
by building on the growing body of literature
regarding neoliberal environments (Heynen et al.
2007; Castree 2010). A neoliberal environments
framework aids in understanding the economic
logic that legitimizes the impacts of fracking on
local water resources. Proponents of neoliberal
strategies suggest that environmental protection
would best occur through market mechanisms,
or the amalgamation of stakeholders motivated to
action on individual economic needs (rather than,
for example, community or non-economic needs)
and making decisions based on a range of personal
costs and benefits. From the point of view of
fracking proponents, costs and benefits are defined
through global energy markets that play out at the
local scale. State and federal regulatory agencies
are an anathema, adding extra and unnecessary
barriers to a properly functioning energy market,
and therefore any regulation should be limited or
eradicated. Assuming that this strategy operates as
expected, the market will signal consumer behavior
and desires. Thus, if consumers are concerned with
energy and/or environmental resources, this will
be appropriately reflected by a fully economized
hydro-social cycle. The ability to influence actor
perceptions of fracking, and thus decision making,
is crucial. It is for this reason that we turn our
attention to pro-fracking discourses.
The main arguments for fracking shale gas are
synergistic and idealize natural gas as the perfect
bridge fuel: it generates a “green” low carbonemitting fossil fuel; it is a domestic energy source
that can replace foreign oil; it can supply growing
energy demands; and it can spur local economic
development. Inherent in these arguments is an
effort to heavily influence the discursive meaning
of water with the intention of dominating the
discourse around the value of fracking to local
communities. Popke (2011) suggests that one of
neoliberalism’s defining features, “has been to
instill an increasingly narrow and individualized
sense of responsibility and ethical agency” (243).
Stakeholders are compelled to internalize these
strategies through a range of discursive structures
(e.g., pressure from family members and neighbors,
common pool and mineral rights regulations,
patriotic discourse concerning domestic energy
development, risk of loss of potential income).
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In turn, as long as state and federal regulatory
influence is minimized, stakeholders will “selfregulate their behavior in ways consistent” with
the goals of oil and gas firms who seek to extract
underlying resources at virtually any social and
ecological cost (Fletcher 2010, 175). Further,
opponents of fracking are discursively positioned
as irrational and unwilling to absorb necessary
costs that would benefit their neighbors and the
nation as a whole . Along these lines, water needs
to be defined only in economic terms, because if it
were considered a life giving, human/non-human
right, it would then no longer be quantifiable in a
global energy market.
A political ecology perspective insists
on tracing the “socially produced character”
of such hydro-social configurations and the
inequitable conditions that often emerge from
them (Swyngedouw 2009, 58). In other words, we
suggest that an analysis of fracking should include
an investigation into the neoliberal-politicized
strategies that various stakeholders and production
firms use to define environmental resources, and
the ways these efforts often benefit some, despite
deleterious impacts on others and the places they
live. For the remainder of this paper, we will focus
on the ways multi-scalar, neoliberal politics define
the meaning and value of water resources with the
underlying goal of motivating stakeholders to allow
drilling within Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier of the
Marcellus Shale. This region should be considered
a proxy for other contexts where similar debates
play out in familiar ways. We follow this section
by discussing the way the hydro-social cycle is
(re)defined in terms of a neoliberal environment,
obfuscating understanding and normalizing
impacts. We then conclude this article with a case
for the importance of interpreting multi-scalar,
pro-fracking arguments in the context of shale gas
plays.
Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier of the
Marcellus Shale Gas Play
The Pennsylvania counties of Tioga, Bradford,
and Susquehanna include some of the most
rural and scenic portions of the state. The region
– colloquially referred to as Pennsylvania’s
Endless Mountains – is notable for its gently
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
Fracking and the Neoliberalization of the Hydro-Social Cycle
rolling mountains and valleys, low population
densities, abundant natural resources, and pastoral
farms. Today, these counties are also a hotbed of
unconventional natural gas production because of
their location above a large portion of the Marcellus
Shale gas play. Currently there are more than
400 active wells across the three counties, which
also account for 27 percent of the state’s gas well
permits issued for Marcellus Shale Development
(from 2007-2010).
The Marcellus Shale encompasses roughly
54,000 miles across portions of New York,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, and
Virginia. The deposit has been estimated to contain
500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (making it the
most productive natural gas strata in the U.S.), and
has become an important target for exploration,
drilling, and production firms (Engelder and Lash
2008). Although the geography of the Marcellus
Shale is widespread, the political ecology of each
region is unique. For example, the state of New
York has continued their moratorium on fracking
and large-scale gas development due to concerns
about drinking water, while Pennsylvania has
maintained large-scale development in the same
shale gas play.
Historically, Pennsylvania’s northeastern tier
was a large forestry production node, where timber
was harvested in remote valleys and floated down
the Susquehanna River to access productive markets
in Williamsport, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg (coal
was abundant farther south in the state, and thus
large-scale industrial production largely bypassed
this region). Today, forestry products remain part
of the region’s economic output, although less
so than in the past. As a result, many residents
take advantage of the resource-rich landscape to
diversify their livelihoods. Pennsylvania’s Scenic
Route 6 runs east-to-west through the counties,
and tourists often visit bed and breakfasts, state
parks, and enjoy abundant hunting and fishing
opportunities. There are also several large acreage
agricultural operations, with primary products
that include dairy, corn, and small-scale vegetable
crops. Nonetheless, this region remains one of the
poorest in the state with a large number of rural,
elderly, and marginal income residents.
Pennsylvania also has a vast supply of clean and
accessible water resources. Indeed, Pennsylvania
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
75
has more miles of streams as a proportion of area
than almost every other state in the contiguous
U.S. (Fleeger 1999). Water is clearly an important
component of the fracking process and the
nation’s broader energy agenda (Beck 2010).
With the confluence of abundant resources,
demographics, as well as antiquated oil and gas
production regulations at the state level where
industrial development is generally favored over
environmental protection, a boom in natural gas
extraction seemed prime to occur (particularly
as the technology has existed for decades, and
booms were occurring in states such as Texas, New
Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado by the late 1990s
to early 2000s). However, it took the Energy Policy
Act of 2005 (Public Law No: 109-58) to give the
extra push needed to stimulate Pennsylvania’s
natural gas boom.
In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy
Act (Public Law No: 109-58), in which fracking
was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act
(except in the case of using diesel fuel as a fracking
fluid). Often referred to as the “Halliburton
Loophole,” this exemption dramatically changed
the extraction landscape in northeastern PA.
The loophole was predicated on the basis of an
Environmental Protection Agency report (USEPA
2004) finding that there was little to no risk of
groundwater contamination from the process of
fracking in coal bed methane extraction of natural
gas. The only restriction was for diesel used as an
additive to fracking fluid, which posed enough
of a risk to underground sources of drinking
water that it was specifically addressed. By this
time, hydraulic fracturing for unconventional gas
deposits was booming in rural portions of other
states (listed above). These states, however, were
also beginning to intensely scrutinize and regulate
the use and reporting of additives in fracking fluids,
land use and reclamation at natural gas production
sites, and flowback wastewater disposal (see
Farquhar 2010; Finley 2011).
As production slowed in other states, around
2005, speculators and energy companies began to
approach landowners in the Marcellus region of
Pennsylvania about the potential of leasing their
property for natural gas development. Through the
early 2000s, much of the natural gas harvested in
PA was produced conventionally, with the drilling
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Finewood and Stroup
of a simple vertical well from which the resource
flowed passively. In 2000, for the U.S. as a whole,
a negligible percentage of natural gas (<1 percent)
was produced through the use of fracking. By 2008,
studies and pilot wells in the state indicated that
the Marcellus Shale would be highly productive
in terms of both quantity and quality of gas
produced from fracking (Esch 2008). By 2009, the
convergence of high volume, slickwater hydraulic
fracturing and horizontal drilling contributed to a
boom in natural gas development in both western
and northern portions of Pennsylvania. By 2009
almost 25 percent of all natural gas produced in
the U.S. occurred through fracking, reflecting the
rapidity with which this extraction method has
influenced natural gas production. Needless to say,
this has made shale gas plays – which as recently
as 2000 were inaccessible and/or uneconomic –
now harvestable and extremely profitable.
Neoliberal Environments
Despite the fact that industrial natural gas
development is initiated at the national and
global scales, land use decision-making and
impacts are felt at the local scale where rural
stakeholders (who often utilize diverse, resourcebased livelihood strategies) must compete for
the same land and water resources as fossil fuel
developers. This brings into focus why oil and
gas firms aggressively try to control the discourse
about the hydro-social cycle. Importantly, desires
to expand local economic growth opportunities are
ever-present, and landowners are often motivated
to lease their property to extraction firms based
on complex, multi-scalar arguments that center on
this possibility. This has created strong tensions
between proponents and opponents, particularly
because water is both abundant in northeastern PA
and is argued to be just another economic input in
the broader picture. This is in opposition to water
as a multi-faceted, multi-value resource that can be
readily degraded, perhaps irrevocably in the natural
gas industrial production process.
Harvey (2005) has broadly posited that neoliberal
strategies are enacted to ensure the consolidation
of capital into specific hands, and Bakker (2010)
suggests that water is a ‘final frontier’ for capitalism.
While we agree, this does not sufficiently explain
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why the multi-scalar, pro-fracking arguments are
effective. We know, for example, that the arguments
are intellectually weak: natural gas extraction is not
“green” (Howarth et al. 2011); shale gas will not
likely get the nation “off” of foreign oil (Tyndall
Centre 2011); fracking poses serious risks to water
quality and is in need of stronger regulations (Parfitt
2010; Jackson et al. 2011). Also the process is
driven by specific interests (e.g., America’s Natural
Gas Alliance). We suggest, then, the issue is less
about the argument, and more about the way the
hydro-social cycle is framed in support of fracking.
Fletcher (2010) suggests that neoliberalism is
a “general strategy of governing human action”
(171), or a way of ‘conducting conduct’ (Foucault
2008; Fletcher 2010, 173). In other words,
neoliberalism is not just an argument, but also a
strategy for reworking societies’ perception of, and
relationship to, the non-human world (McCarthy
and Prudham 2004; Heynen et al. 2007). Since, at
the outset, environmental concerns are often seen
in opposition to development, fracking proponents
must co-opt, define, and control the meaning
of environmental resources. This first means
redefining the value of water as an economic input,
so that its degradation makes sense in a broader
benefit/cost framework. Thus the hydro-social cycle
is less a relationship between people and water,
but rather a commodity that can be monetized for
global markets (Finewood and Porter 2010). One
can observe the effectiveness of such a practice
through the sacrifices that individuals are expected
to make for their – and the nation’s – economic
future. In other words, people must exchange their
noneconomic resources for economic resources, as
if they were simply interchangeable.
In this scenario, firms are the legitimate source of
knowledge and information. Neoliberal approaches
to environmental governance suggest “rolling back”
environmental regulations (Peck and Tickell 2002),
tacitly celebrating the knowledge and experience of
private industry. In this case, with a lack of funding
for regulatory agencies and a general disdain for
environmental concerns when framed as opposing
economic development, a knowledge vacuum is
created for oil and gas firms to fill. Firms become
the de facto expertise on the environmental impacts
of fracking as well as the expert counterpoint to
anti-fracking voices. In addition, as the fracking
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
Fracking and the Neoliberalization of the Hydro-Social Cycle
process happens up to a mile under the surface of
the ground, in largely inaccessible and rural areas,
and often on private property, the full spatial and
temporal impacts of the process occur largely outof-sight, leaving stakeholders very few alternatives
but to seek information from oil and gas firms.
Finally, as the neoliberalization of the hydrosocial cycle becomes taken-for-granted, or common
sense, those who speak up for water resources
as a human/non-human right are increasingly
marginalized. The refrain of environmentalists
as “anti-jobs,” “being out of touch with reality,”
and/or “prioritizing nature over people” has
become relatively common trope in U.S. society.
Even those who may not consider themselves
environmentalists, but seek to advocate for
regional environmental resources, are marginalized
within the broader debate. Further, not only does
this tactic set the discursive stage for a rational
group of economically minded people versus
irrational environmentalists (i.e., economy versus
the environment), but it also uses environmental
perception as an arena for political and economic
projects (Heynen et al. 2007, 12). Thus the
legitimacy of a neoliberal environment discourse is
reinforced while delegitimizing alternatives.
Conclusion
Thus far we have argued that multi-scale
neoliberal discourses do more than obfuscate
comprehensive understandings of the impacts of
fracking on water resources. They also create a way
of conducting conduct that normalizes the impacts
fracking has on water resources. In this vein of
thinking, Castree (2003) has asked, why should we
care about the capitalization of nature? We contend
that the socio-environmental risks of fracking are
potentially high and it is largely rural communities
who are vulnerable to these risks. At the same time,
these communities must make land use decisions
based on incomplete and competing forms of
knowledge. One or our goals is to bring attention
to the potential impacts of fracking and to develop
a better understanding of the ways stakeholders
perceive costs and benefits in order to make land
use decisions.
But more broadly, we are interested in
contributing to a context-specific analysis of the
Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education
77
ways neoliberalism is (re)defining the relationships
between people and the non-human world. As
market approaches to environmental regulation
become a more accepted, and perhaps a dominant
part of governance strategy (See Anderson and
Leal 2001), places like northeastern PA are,
“written off for environmental destruction in the
name of a higher purpose, such as the national
interest” (Scott 2010, 31). These “sacrifice zones”
assume an ecological disconnect between people
and their environment, normalizing environmental
degradation in some places while protecting
others, and also assume no alternative uses of land
or energy resources. This can be viewed as a form
of remote environmental exploitation and brutality
where the scalar issues make these sacrifice zones
almost invisible to the larger nation and world. We
feel that these struggles to (re)define the nature/
society relationship is about the power to ensure
capital flows into specific hands, which will
likely result in greater costs to other people and
their environments. Formally investigating and
deconstructing pro-fracking discourses is part of an
ongoing project to come to terms with the realities
involved with the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle and with the water-energy nexus, and
to strive for a more equitable future.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Yan Lin, Beth Kinne, and
Dustin Pollard for helping us with regional guidance,
knowledge, and research assistance. Also, our gratitude
goes out to the anonymous group of stakeholders who
provided perspective and concerns about changes within
their communities.
Author Bios and Contact Information
Michael H. Finewood is an Assistant Professor of
Sustainability at Chatham University’s School of
Sustainability and the Environment in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. His research interests include
environmental health, economic development, and
environmental justice with a focus on the political
ecology of the global north. In addition to natural gas
research in Pennsylvania and New York, he has worked
on issues related to sustainability, amenity migration,
and sea level rise in South Carolina and Virginia. He
can be reached at [email protected].
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Finewood and Stroup
Laura J. Stroup is an Assistant Professor of
Environmental Studies at St. Michael’s College in
Colchester, VT. Her specializations include water
resources and their management in the U.S., physical
geography, and environmental policy. Previous research
projects examined the ways community greenways
can be used as tools for students to better understand
human-environment interactions and how diverse water
managers and stakeholders across the U.S. adapt their
water management practices to climate variability and
change. She can be reached at [email protected].
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