Is the Gas Fracking Industry Buying Favorable Studies?

The cam­paign is loaded with rosy employ­ment sta­tis­tics, which trace to an April report authored by pro­fes­sors at three major Ohio uni­ver­si­ties and funded by, you guessed it, the nat­ural gas indus­try. The report paints a bright future for frack­ing in Ohio as a job creator.

One co-author of the study, Robert Chase, is poised at such a high-traffic cross­roads of that state’s nat­ural gas uni­verse that his case was recently taken up by the Ohio Ethics Commission, whose chair called him “more than a pass­ing par­tic­i­pant in the oper­a­tions of the Ohio oil and gas indus­try,” and ques­tioned his poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est. As landown­ers in a suite of nat­ural gas-rich states like Texas and Ohio strug­gle to deci­pher con­flict­ing reports about the safety of frack­ing, Chase is a piece in what envi­ron­men­tal and aca­d­e­mic watch­dogs call a grow­ing puz­zle of industry-funded frack­ing research with poor dis­clo­sure and dubi­ous objectivity.

“It’s hard to find some­one who’s truly inde­pen­dent and doesn’t have at least one iron in the fire,” said Ohio oil-and-gas-lease attor­ney Mark F. Okey. “It’s a good ol’ boys net­work and they like to take care of their own.”

Chase got his petro­leum engi­neer­ing PhD from Penn State. In 2009, long after Chase left the uni­ver­sity, it came under fire for a frack­ing report, widely cited by state politi­cians as evi­dence for open­ing up the frack­ing mar­ket, which an in-house inves­ti­ga­tor said “crossed the line between pol­icy analy­sis and pol­icy advo­cacy.”  Early in his career, Chase worked as a con­sul­tant for many of the nation’s biggest oil and gas devel­op­ers, includ­ing Halliburton, Cabot, and EQT.

In 1978, he began teach­ing petro­leum engi­neer­ing at Marietta College, the small Ohio lib­eral arts school where he remains on fac­ulty today. In 2008, Ohio’s then-Gov. Ted Strickland (D) appointed him to the Ohio Oil & Gas Commission, an inde­pen­dent judi­ciary board that hears com­plaints from landown­ers and devel­op­ers against the state’s Division of Mineral Resources Management. And last year, he founded his own con­sul­tancy, Chaseland LLC, that helps con­nect landown­ers with gas com­pa­nies seek­ing drilling rights, for which Chase col­lects a commission.

In February, Chase gave glow­ing tes­ti­mony to Congress on the ben­e­fits of frack­ing, and included a swipe at anti-fracking advo­cates by cit­ing the very same study now being inves­ti­gated at the University of Texas. In recent years, Chase has taken his pro-fracking stance to the pages of Ohio news­pa­pers to call for increased frack­ing and to assure locals of its safety; his lat­est col­umn was soundly rebutted by a pair of Cincinnati geol­o­gists, who wrote that Chase had made “sev­eral mis­lead­ing asser­tions.” State offi­cials tight­ened frack­ing reg­u­la­tions after a series of earth­quakes in north­east­ern Ohio, includ­ing a 4.0 quake in Youngstown on New Year’s Eve.

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