Western Energy Alliance (WEA) president Tim Wigley knows he has a challenging task in working with, and teaching “a bunch of really smart, but linear-thinking engineers” and to convince them that the oil and gas industry has an advocacy problem.

Speaking at NAPE Denver recently, Wigley told the audience that the public has heard about fracking but doesn’t know much, if anything, about the process or its benefits. “They just think it’s bad,” he said.

But after spending a lot of time interviewing and listening to both members of the industry and laypeople, Wigley said he’s realized that it really comes down to an attitude of “what’s in it for me?”

“We, in the industry, know what’s in it for us,” he said. But when it comes to educating the public, the question becomes, “How do we fill that information void and let them know what’s in it for them?”

Wigley, who began with Denver-based WEA in 2011, watched as one local community in Colorado—Longmont—passed a ballot measure to ban hydraulic fracturing. That ban was followed by five-year moratoriums in Fort Collins and three other Boulder County communities. According to Wigley, these actions put the state at the forefront of energy conflict, especially with the skyrocketing amount of oil and gas drilling that’s occurred in the state and region since 2008.

In the last six years alone in Colorado, there have been mandated frack fluid disclosure regulations, the first of their kind in the country, and groundwater monitoring regulations that include pre-drilling and post-drilling monitoring. In addition, there were set-back rules and first-of-their-kind methane leak detection emission rules enacted in 2013.

But why is Colorado so important right now?

“Depending on the legal and community challenges here, it could boost in-state and out-of-state anti-development groups, and allow other states to piggyback off of the legal precedents and state government actions made here,” Wigley said. “Anti-industry’s plan has always been, ‘If we can pass it in Colorado, we can get it passed in other states.’”

In 2013, WEA began listening to the public’s impressions about hydraulic fracturing. The group found that about 90% of voters interviewed had heard of hydraulic fracturing, and more than 50% said it was bad. Yet, Wigley pointed out, their actual knowledge of fracturing is miniscule.

“Most people think that gas comes from the Shell station by the grocery store,” he said. “They just don’t think about, or know, where stuff comes from. They don’t have a connection to the land, and that’s dangerous for any natural resource organization.

“And think about all the misinformation that’s out there. The average voter doesn’t know [hydraulic fracturing] has been around for 60 years, that there have been more than 2 million fractured wells, that it is highly regulated and monitored, that the first well drilled west of the Mississippi was near Florissant in 1860, and that Colorado is the first state to mandate disclosure of frack fluid ingredients.”

The WEA helped create Coloradoans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED). The group has produced several television ads, and the CRED website provides scientific and easy-to-understand information about hydraulic fracturing. The organization is made up of former elected officials, community and civic leaders and non-energy industry representatives such as farmers, ranchers and educators.

Another Winter NAPE 2015 speaker, Dan Haley, president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA), noted that energy is part of the fabric of the west—along with mining and agriculture—although things have changed over the last 20 years. “In the last 10 years alone, there are about two million more people living [in Colorado],” he said. “Where the suburbs sprawled, where new people are living now, it was, for a long time, agricultural or energy acreage.”

He said that while the industry neglected to engage with citizens, and instead focused on developing new technologies, anti-fracturing proponents were “out there telling them their faucets were going to catch fire or that their children were going to get bloody noses if they were lucky enough to live that long.”

He said COGA’s mission is about community outreach and “letting them know what is going to be happening, what it’s going to smell like, what it’s going to sound like—arm them with science and facts.”

COGA has two full-time community outreach coordinators, who hold open houses across the state along with experts who engage in question-and answer sessions with the public. “It’s almost like a science fair,” Haley said. “Citizens can see videos. They can run their hands through proppant, and they can see what fracking fluid looks like.”

Haley said that fracturing lacks “technological sexiness.” “If these technologies were coming out of Menlo Park or Palo Alto, California, instead of North Dakota, rural Colorado or West Texas, they would be the technologies that everyone would be talking about,” he said.

Larry Prado can be reached at lprado@hartenergy.com.