RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. One the face of it, fracking is a relatively simple term. It's short for hydraulic fracturing. And it's a controversial technology that breaks up rock deep underground to release oil and natural gas. But there's another technology that is also behind the recent surge in oil and gas production in the U.S. It's called horizontal drilling. It doesn't have the catchy and slightly edgy sound of the word fracking. And as NPR's Jeff Brady reports, it doesn't fit so neatly in a sign or a slogan.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Here's why horizontal drilling is just as important as fracking. Much of the oil and natural gas that drillers are after these days is sandwiched deep underground in layers of rock. Terry Engelder is a geologist at Pennsylvania State University. In his region, that layer of natural-gas-rich rock is called the Marcellus Shale.
TERRY ENGELDER: A vertical well going through a hundred-foot-thick gas shale, like the Marcellus, contacts that formation for a hundred feet.
BRADY: That means a driller would be able to extract oil or gas from only that 100-foot section. But with horizontal drilling, the drill bit makes a turn and extends the well out horizontally, through that layer of petroleum-rich shale. Instead of extracting gas from only a hundred-foot section, now a driller can extract it from a section that extends a mile or more. Combine that increased access with the pulverizing power of fracking and Professor Engelder says that's what's boosting oil and gas production.
ENGELDER: The reason that gas has been such a spectacular success is because of the combination of these two different techniques together.
BRADY: Fracking and horizontal drilling have turned once-sleepy communities into industrial zones. The environmental consequences spawned a new protest movement. It's showing up in your movie theater - that recent film "Promised Land" - and on the TV show "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon."
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BRADY: As Yoko Ono held a globe labeled Mother Earth, her son sang about the dangers of fracking. But they never mention horizontal drilling.
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BRADY: While you won't hear the term horizontal drilling in a song or on a bumper sticker, it's just as responsible as fracking for changing rural landscapes. Chris Tucker with the petroleum industry group Energy in Depth has thought about why all the focus on fracking.
CHRIS TUCKER: The word fracking, it's sort of percussive-sounding. It, you know, starts with F ends in C-K. I mean, it sort of has this naughty connotation to it. I imagine part of the fascination with the word is frankly the construction of the term.
BRADY: And, Tucker points out, opponents of his industry have run with term. At rallies, protesters hold signs that creatively employ the word fracking.
TUCKER: It's been sort of reduced, right? It's been distilled down to this almost curse-word. And that's important for press releases and bumper stickers and everything else. Horizontal drilling hasn't been distilled that way.
BRADY: This focus on fracking and not horizontal drilling has surprised even some of the petroleum industry's loudest critics. Bruce Baizel heads the Oil and Gas Accountability Project. He's based in Durango, Colorado.
BRUCE BAIZEL: In our organization, we talked about the catchall term for this set of issues and impacts.
BRADY: The term fracking has evolved to mean more than just hydraulic fracturing. Baizel says people now use it to refer to just about anything to do with producing oil and gas.
BAIZEL: It means either drilling or it means, actually, hydraulic fracturing or it means the truck that ran off the road and spilled whatever the waste was it was hauling away from the well site.
BRADY: Groups like Baizel's, that regularly go up against huge oil companies, have embraced this expanded definition of fracking. Oil and gas drilling employs complicated technology that can be difficult to explain to the general public. But with one common word - especially one like fracking that just sounds bad - it's easier to rally opposition. Jeff Brady, NPR News.