How We Got the Eagle Ford Fracking Story
InsideClimate News 2014-02-18
Summary:
By Lisa Song, David Hasemyer and Jim Morris
Inside the making of Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale: Big Oil and Bad Air on the Texas Prairie
An eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News, the Center for Public Integrity and The Weather Channel
How does one of America's biggest oil and gas booms go mostly unrecognized in the national media? Hard to say, but it has. A subject of solid local coverage, the Eagle Ford Shale play in South Texas has yet to become part of the national conversation on hydraulic fracturing—fracking—in contrast to, say, Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale or North Dakota's Bakken.
This oddity, along with the sheer size of the play—26 counties, 20,000 square miles— attracted us to the story. We focused on the air-quality impacts of drilling and related activities because chemical-laden air may prove to be an even bigger public health consequence than tainted water, which has been widely reported.
The partnership that produced Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale: Big Oil and Bad Air on the Texas Prairie was formed in the spring of 2013. Two nonprofit news organizations, the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News, teamed up with The Weather Channel to explore the issue of air emissions and the consequences for the people of the Eagle Ford.