“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 48

But no one can top Talisman Energy, which until 2011 was probably
best known in Pennsylvania for having more citations for safety violations
than any other shale gas operator in the state. 75 (In its defense, Talisman had
also drilled the most wells, and in 2011 it radically reduced the number of
citations.) A couple years before, concerned executives at Talisman head-
quarters in Calgary, Alberta, dreamed up a way of improving their relations
with the communities where they were operating: they would commission
a kids' coloring book . 76 h e result was twenty-four pages chronicling the
exploits of Talisman Terry, the Friendly Frackasaurus, a hardhat-wearing
dinosaur who showed kids where shale gas came from (apparently the fos-
silized remains of Terry's ancestors) and how rainbows appear at er frack-
ing. h is all went largely unnoticed until Stephen Colbert, the Comedy
Central host, caught wind of it. He spun a i ve-minute segment out of the
unintentionally hilarious coloring book; a day later, Talisman Energy put
the Friendly Frackasaurus to rest.
For Bill Dix, like so many people who were caught in the middle of
the i ghts over shale gas, the debate over whether development was safe
or dangerous seemed to miss the point. What mat ered was how it was
done and regulated. “h is can happen in two really drastically dif erent
ways,” he told me. “All the environmentalists from Athens go over the
hill here to Wetzel County. Wetzel County is over in West Virginia. It is
steep. It is up and down. It's big country.” h e area had long been mined
for coal and recently been drilled for gas. “h e whole government of
West Virginia basically has been in the pocket of the mineral companies
forever,” he charged. “It's a hell of a mess. It's terrible. I visited there,
I came back, I couldn't sleep for days. It is a disaster.”
Dix put this in stark contrast with another recent experience.
“A group of landowners, we had a connection over in Bradford
County, Pennsylvania, which was where the real heart of the whole
thing with the dry gas was. We went to Bradford County, and it was
meticulously done. Everybody was happy with it. h e earthwork, the
environmental safety, I mean it was just incredible.” Dix chalked up
the dif erence, compared to West Virginia, to how Pennsylvania and
Bradford County handled development: “h e landowners had some
rights, there was a decent lease in place, and the state of Pennsylvania,