MANY OF THE key government agencies that Jessica Ernst has challenged have gone through several Orwellian name changes.
Ernst’s historical water well records were filed with Alberta Environmental Protection. It then morphed into Alberta Environment and, later, Alberta Environment and Water. It is now called Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development. Throughout the book it is simply referred to as Alberta Environment.
The scandal-plagued energy regulator has undergone similar brand-name surgery. At the beginning of this story it was called the Energy Utilities Board. After it was caught spying on Albertans, it became the Energy Resources Conservation Board. It now calls itself the Alberta Energy Regulator and is 100 percent funded by industry. Throughout the book the board is called what it was called at the time.
Fracking is not a real word, but the world and industry’s aggressive tactics have made it so. Industry slang for the forceful technology used to be frac’ing or fraccing. But when the technology got bigger and messier with slick-water fracturing, the media adopted the more familiar-looking fracking.
Fracking, of course, was a common curse word on the television series Battlestar Galactica. As a consequence, many petroleum engineers still refuse to use it. Yet whether fracking or frac’ing, the term still means the same thing: the injection of fluid or gas through vertical or horizontal wells into shallow or deep formations to pulverize low-quality rocks.
To this day, many environmental groups wrongly assume that the word only refers to cracking deep rock formations with horizontal wells. Meanwhile, industry continues to sexualize the technology by referring to it as stimulation or enhanced stimulation. A “nitrogen stimulation,” for example, is a hydraulic fracturing job with gas. Rig hands often directly call the technology “earth fucking.” It is an apt description.
In any case, the book mostly refers to the technology as “hydraulic fracturing.” And where it uses the new media creation fracking, petroleum engineers can relax: it is not being employed as an expletive.