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Why, exactly, is high-volume slickwater hydraulic fracturing such a devastating industry? How best to describe its singularity-its vastness, its difference from other industries and its threat to the planet?

When I interviewed Dr. Anthony Ingraffea-Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering, Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow at Cornell University and president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, Inc., I realized that his comments were perhaps the clearest, most compactly instructive of any I’d heard on fracking. So I expanded the original interview to include Ingraffea’s reflections on his odyssey from an industry insider to an implacable fracking opponent, with his descriptions of the fascinating nature of 400 million-year-old shale formations and what, precisely, corporations do when they disrupt these creations of nature.

Ingraffea is perhaps best-known for his co-authorship of a Cornell University 2011 study that established the greenhouse gas footprint of fracking as being greater than that of any other fossil fuel including coal. The lead-investigator for
Methane and the Greenhouse-Gas Footprint of Natural Gas from Shale Formations, often called “The Cornell Study,” was Robert Howarth, David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Microbiology. A third co-author was research aide Renee Santoro.

Ingraffea has been a principal investigator on research and development projects ranging from the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through Schlumberger, Gas Research Institute, Sandia National Laboratories, Association of Iron and Steel Engineers, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman Aerospace. Having been an industry insider for so long, he’s a formidable opponent of anyone who dares to go against him in a debate about high-volume hydraulic fracturing.