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OGA 9: Panel Discussion – Community Engagement
Panel V: Community Engagement: Are we losing the Public’s confidence?
- Winning the public perception battle: What is the current perception and how can positive change
- Connecting with local communities – employing local workers, donating to local charities, finance community projects
- Employing effective transparency to manage adverse events
- Judging the importance of social media in connecting with the community and stakeholders
- Forced pooling/unitization – how to make the case
- First impressions count: are your landmen helping or hurting your company’s reputation?
- Connecting with your leased landowners – keeping the lines of communication open and operating
- Maintaining good relations with surface rights owners who don’t own mineral rights
- Dealing with anti-drilling groups and protesters in a professional and positive way
Moderator: Alex Grant, Conference Producer, Oil & Gas Awards
Speakers: Brittany Thomas, Coordinator External Affairs, Cabot Oil & Gas
Sarah Barczyk, Manager, Community Relations & Stakeholder Outreach, NiSource Midstream Services
Dan Weaver, Public Relations, PIOGA
Stacey Brodak, Manager Community and Media Relations, Noble Energy
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Everyone knows how mercenary and evil those oil and gas companies are. They’re just in it for the buck. Rape and pillage poor Mother Earth–pollute the air, pollute the water, pollute everything! Those shale drillers are actually some of the worst, ya know. That’s what the anti-drilling left would have you believe. That’s the meme constantly drummed by mainstream media. Throw in a “Halliburton loophole” and “Dimock” or maybe a “Pavillion, Wyoming” and you’re good to go with the typical mainstream coverage of our industry. Just a teeny, tiny problem…none of it is true.
Last Monday a little known anti-driller with a potty mouth from northeast PA–Vera Scroggins–had her day in court. You may recall that Vera had repeatedly trespassed on drilling sites owned by Cabot Oil & Gas in Susquehanna County and a judge slapped her with a restraining order last year. Vera said the court order prevented her from sipping lattes at the local Price Chopper grocery store (land leased by Cabot) so she got herself a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union and asked the judge to reconsider (see 
A newly published peer reviewed study in the February Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) offers new research that we believe comes close to, if not fully, exonerating Cabot Oil & Gas over the now infamous case of methane migration into water wells in a small area of Dimock, PA. The new study has no connection to Cabot. It is written by three experts and uses (gasp) actual science–you know, in the field data? The data comes from “more than 2,300 gas and water samples collected from 234 gas wells and 67 private groundwater-supply wells” in northeastern PA and is the largest such data set ever analyzed. What did the authors find? Shallow (near the surface) methane with the same identical chemical “fingerprint” as deeper Marcellus Shale gas is naturally occurring in large quantities in northeastern PA. That is, the shallow methane under the microscope looks exactly like the methane found more than a mile below the ground, but it isn’t gas from the Marcellus because the methane near the surface that looks just like Marcellus gas, with the same chemical “fingerprint,” was lurking in water wells long before there was any shale drilling in the area.
What do you call it when a company pays money to local organizations and agencies before the project has been fully approved by federal, state and local agencies? These payments, mind you, are not fees for permits or licenses, but voluntary chunks of money offered to groups that may be affected by the project if it’s built–in this case a pipeline. Is it called, Good corporate citizenship? Being a responsible member of the local community? Or perhaps, payola?