Wednesday, October 5, 2016

'Fracking War' - energy company required reading

POINT RICHMOND, Calif. - The Fracking War might not have made the NY Times best seller list yet. (Yet! Yet!)

But this week a note from a friend - who was purchasing a signed copy of Fracking Justice - indicates The Fracking War is clearly hitting some of its target audience.

How many copies of The Fracking War are inside?
She mentioned that her son said The Fracking War is considered to be "required reading" at the east coast energy company where he works.

Perhaps that bears repeating: "required reading" at the east coast energy company where he works. 

That's high praise, whether the book is reviled or revered. Oh, and by the way, he doesn't work at the energy company in the photo to the right. But I wonder how many copies of The Fracking War  might be lurking in the hundreds of offices of that energy company office, too?

When The Fracking War was first published, one hope was that it would help educate (and inflame) people about the ills of hydrofracking, using the fictional tale about the work of investigative/columnist Jack Stafford and The Horseheads Clarion newspaper staff.

It worked to a large degree, at least based on reactions from people in the Northeast including many who were protesting (and continue to protest) the proposed loony liquid propane gas storage project at Seneca Lake proposed by Crestwood Midstream of Houston, Texas.

As part of the marketing of the book, copies were sent to energy company executives and some of the more prominent public relations hacks in the employ of the industry.

Apparently not all of them pitched their copies of The Fracking War into their desk-side round files.

The news that this energy company is paying attention came at just the right moment. In the coming weeks I hope to tackle the final section of the next novel, The Devil's Pipeline. Good God but there's so much material going on in real time, in the real world, it's hard to predict what will happen in the final chapters of this third book.

But you can be pretty sure it will end with a bang, like The Fracking War and Fracking Justice. And maybe even on a Native American reservation, somewhere on the Northern Plains of the U.S.

Results of a natural gas pipeline explosion