Terry Engelder, photo credit John Wright and HWUPetroleum

Background

Terry Engelder received his B.S. from Penn State in 1968, his M.S. from Yale in 1972 and his Ph.D in geology from Texas A&M University in 1973. He began teaching at Penn State in 1985, where he received the Wilson Distinguished Teaching Award. He currently teaches there as Professor of Geosciences. Engelder has worked in the past at Columbia University, the US Geological survey, and Texaco. He has also done work as a visiting professor in Italy and Australia. He has received a Fulbright Senior Fellowship award. He has written over 150 research papers in areas relating to the oil and gas industry and has worked with companies including Petrobras, Saudi Aramco, and Royal Dutch Shell.

Fracking

Before 2008, Engelder worked as a relatively unknown geologist at Penn State, studying fracture behaviors in black shales. In 2008, along with Gary G. Lash, he calculated the amount of natural gas that may be available in the Marcellus Shale formation. He and Lash found that the Marcellus formation contained 25 times as much gas as had been previously calculated. This discovery instigated the 2008 fracking boom surrounding the Marcellus formation which has raised the Marcellus shale formation to one of the world’s primary natural gas reserves.

Public Advocacy

Since the 2008 boom, Engelder has become a prominent public advocate for natural gas production and fracking. He has made over 300 public appearances, met with over 450 journalists and participated in a number of debates concerning natural gas production. He puts natural gas forward as a cleaner alternative to coal, pointing as evidence to the decline in CO2 emissions from energy production since the fracking boom began. However, Engelder does acknowledge that a sustainable, renewable source of energy will eventually be needed. In a 2012 interview he called for more money to be spent on research and development of new energy sources, such as nuclear and solar.