Aubrey McClendon, CEO of US natural gas firm Chesapeake has hit back at a New York Times story casting doubt on the potential and practices of shale gas exploration production.
In a 1,700 email to Chesapeake staff, McClendon brands the story – corroborated by hundreds of disclosed emails from indutry insiders and analysts – as “misleading at best, and is the latest in a series of articles produced by this publication that obviously have a anti-industry bias”.
In the email – published on the firm’s Facebook page -McClendon states the Times story is the product of the “same group of environmental activists who have been the driving force behind the NYT’s ongoing series of negative articles about the use of fracking and its importance to the US natural gas supply growth revolution”, whom McClendon brands as naifs who “presume that our great country need only rely on wind and solar energy to meet our current and future energy needs”.
With reference to the material collect by the Times from various sources, McCeldon brand the correspondents “a few of the doubters” fashioned together by the “one venerable” Times out of an alleged prior motivation to cast shale gas negatively.
McClendon also rebuts the claims in several of the emails that reserves of shale gas are smaller than announced, and reserves statemant have been inflated by shale companies, including Chesapeake.
“This reporter’s claim of impending scarcity of natural gas supply contradicts the facts and the scientific extrapolation of those facts by the most sophisticated reservoir engineers and geoscientists in the world,” says McClendon. “Not just at Chesapeake, but by experts at many of the world’s leading energy companies that have made multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments in U.S. shale gas plays, with us and many other companies. Notable examples of these companies, besides the leading independents such as Chesapeake, Devon, Anadarko, EOG, EnCana, Talisman and others, include these leading global energy giants: Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Statoil, BHP, Total, CNOOC, Marathon, BG, KNOC, Reliance, PetroChina, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and ENI, among others”.
“Is it really possible that all of these companies, with a combined market cap of almost $2 trillion, know less about shale gas than a NYT reporter, a few environmental activists and a handful of shale gas doubters? I seriously doubt it,” McClendon says.
The email concludes with an appeal to support the firm’s political action committee.
