Public Opinion Toward Hydraulic Fracturing: The Effect of Beyond Compliance and Voluntary Third-Party Certification

Abstract

A survey with an embedded experiment was conducted to test how residents would respond to a commitment by oil and natural gas producers to conduct nearby fracking operations in a manner that is more protective of health and the environment than existing state and federal regulations. The experiment specifically assessed how the use of independent third-party certification of operations coupled with "beyond compliance" practices would influence local public support for oil and gas development. The state of Colorado was chosen due to its long history of oil and gas development, its leadership amongst states in advancing fracking, and the current local-level conflicts surrounding oil and gas development. A public opinion survey (N= 390) of a representative sample of Colorado residents found that "green certification" of a production company's activities led to substantially increased levels of support for a hypothetical nearby oil and natural gas project. Our findings suggest that oil and gas developers can obtain greater public support for their projects by voluntarily engaging in practices that are more protective than current state and federal regulations together with third-party certification of those practices. In effect, these coupled actions serve as a mechanism that promotes a firm's "social license to operate".