One summer when I was a child I spent my days riding with my grandfather on his tractor as he worked in his cotton fields. To stop my steady stream of “but whys?,” he would turn me loose to catch the hundreds of jackrabbits that called the fields home. For every one that I caught, he would pay me US $5. With empty pockets and a dusty mouth, I would go with him to the coffee shop for lunch. It was there that I first heard the holy trinity of Texas farmer “shop talk”: football, cotton futures, and chances of rain.

As summer approaches, the need for rain continues to be strong across most of the High Plains and southwestern US. Exceptional drought has placed extreme pressures on state and local water management plans. And in those drought-stricken areas that have rigs working night and day, it is easy to single out the industry as being a major consumer of water. People have questions about how much water is being used and why so much is needed by the industry to frac a well.

People turn to the news media first and their neighbors second for those answers, according to an April 2012 report by the Deloitte Center for Energy on its survey of the public opinion of shale gas development. However, in regard to the trustworthiness of the news media when it comes to coverage of the industry, only 17% felt the coverage was “extremely” or “very” trustworthy.

Peter Robertson, an independent senior advisor for oil and gas at Deloitte LLP, said the report shows that there is an opportunity that “exists right now to improve the perception of trustworthiness of the industry by providing more information.”

But has the industry provided too much? Regina Hopper, president of America’s Natural Gas Alliance, in remarks about potential hydraulic fracturing in New York, said that residents there have “heard so much from both sides … that they’re kind of shutting down.” The remark was made during the US Energy Association’s State of the Energy Industry forum in Washing-ton, D.C. Hopper encouraged natural gas supporters to have conversations with people who sincerely have questions about natural gas development, keeping in mind that the mission is “to talk with these folks – not to them, but with them.”

Her remarks are timely in that supporters of the motion picture Promised Land have attempted to direct the public’s attention to the national debate on hydraulic fracturing. But based on early box office returns, it appears that the movie’s supporters may learn what most in the industry already know: that capturing and keeping the public’s attention can be as difficult as catching Permian basin jackrabbits on a summer day. The real trick, however, is in knowing what to do with the attention after it is caught so that it does not get away or bite you badly in the polls.

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