Shale gas industry survived tax debate, but image suffered

Gov. Rendell called it quits last week on his yearlong effort to enact a Marcellus Shale natural gas tax. But Rendell was not the only loser in the tax debate.

The natural gas industry survived Rendell's effort to enact a severance tax on gas production, but its image has been badly battered by a confluence of negative publicity, starting with the tax debate and magnified by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"As an industry, we're just doing a horrible job on communication until recently," said Matt Pitzarella, spokesman for Range Resources Corp., a Texas gas operator that has launched an aggressive Pennsylvania advertising campaign to differentiate itself among Marcellus drillers.

"If people don't know who Range Resources is, they think we're all BP," Pitzarella said.

The industry could see this coming.

A year ago, when Marcellus drilling companies were riding a euphoric wave, boasting that they were producing a clean-burning domestic fuel that would turbocharge Pennsylvania's economy, a Washington consultant named Steven A. Shapiro advised drillers to gird themselves for an inevitable public backlash.

Shapiro, a partner in a conflict-resolution consultancy called Certus Strategies, suggested a host of "outrage-management strategies" to "protect" the majority of the population from being influenced by anti-drilling activists. He made the presentation in November at the Pennsylvania Natural Gas Summit in State College.

His presentation - "Managing Stakeholder and Community Resistance to the Marcellus Shale Gas Extraction Project" - has gotten renewed attention in the wake of recent controversy about the state homeland-security director's tracking of protests by activists, including anti-drilling groups.

Some Internet commentators suggested that Shapiro's presentation was an Orwellian attempt to manipulate public opinion. But the consultant's pitch seems to be as much about enlightening a maladroit industry that has an underdeveloped sense of community outreach.

"I think to some degree the industry has a certain bit of arrogance, sort of a take-it-or-leave-it attitude," Shapiro said in an interview. "That attitude exists across the industry because they're not used to being told no. They just don't have the training and capacity to deal with these local issues."