Is Energy Policy a Storytelling Exercise? New Text-as-Data Research on How Governments Legitimize Shale Gas
Shale gas is a form of natural gas extracted from shale rock through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, using high-pressure injection of water and chemicals. This technology has enabled record levels of shale gas production, yet carries well-documented externalities including methane emissions and water contamination. Additionally, continued fossil fuel extraction risks derailing the emissions pathway necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. Despite mounting scrutiny of fossil fuels’ climate impact and the social costs of fracking, government support for shale gas has persisted. A new study published in Environmental Politics, “State Narratives of Shale Gas Development: Evidence from a Text-as-Data Study of the United States and China,” argues that this persistence is not simply a function of resource endowments or technological progress, but reflects the power of narratives that shape the boundaries of what states can credibly pursue and defend in resource development.
Comparing the United States and China
The study examines 225 government statements from the United States and China released from 2010 to 2024. It identifies five narratives of shale gas through which both governments legitimize its development:
The economic narrative that positions shale gas as a driver of jobs and opportunities;
The security framing that emphasizes energy independence and reduced reliance on imports;
The innovation perspective which highlights efficient fuel extraction and technology transfer;
The clean shale narrative that depicts shale gas as an environmentally compatible fuel by displacing coal;
The climate frame that attributes shale gas to emissions reduction.
Findings reveal that these shale gas stories shift in relative prominence across the studied period in response to political events, policy priorities, and external pressures. The economic and energy security narratives anchor both national contexts, demonstrating a shared interest in presenting shale gas as essential to national prosperity and strategic self-sufficiency. In addition, China faces greater geological complexity in its shale formations and builds a narrative around modernization and industrial upgrading, with a clean shale gas narrative calibrated closely to the Blue Sky Defense Battle against fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Beyond domestic objectives, shale gas knowledge and fracking know-how also serve a diplomatic goal, as bilateral statements demonstrate how U.S. leadership in energy technology is leveraged to transfer technical know-how and strengthen international influence. Comparing the United States and China, the world’s two largest energy producers, reveals a shared logic of legitimization, while each state’s distinct developmental priorities and climate governance pressures shape the specific contours of its shale gas stories.
Mixed-methods inquiry in narrative research
The study employs a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative and computational text-as-data analysis. It starts by extracting 225 government statements in hypertext mark-up (HTML) format and compiles them into a document corpus using Python. By restricting the corpus to publicly released statements on government webpages, the analysis captures discourse crafted for broad public consumption while mitigating the heterogeneity of lengthy legal or technical texts. Following human coding through close reading to derive key themes from texts, two text-as-data analyses are conducted: mean term-frequency analysis, which tracks how the salience of these shale gas narrative shifts across the 15-year period, and the normalized document-level co-occurrence matrices, which show how narratives interact with one another using a Jaccard formula. This enables a nuanced account of how narratives are constructed and how they reinforce one another across statements. A chief contribution of this study lies in the integration of close and distant reading within this design. Unlike conventional close reading, which is necessarily linear and constrained by a reader’s passage through texts document by document, distant reading offers a non-linear entry point into large corpora, where statistical outputs serve as navigational aids. Computational text analysis also surfaces structures difficult to discern by close reading alone, directing attention toward the narrative patterns and junctures that warrant further engagement. Examining how narratives co-occur and cluster over time in this study reveals the discursive logic through which shale gas is legitimized in state discourse.
Shale gas as a contentious energy source
Although the five narratives identified in this study are what states use to construct shale gas as legitimate, whether this legitimacy is empirically warranted to realize a sustainable future is a separate question. The clean and climate-compatible framing both states deploy sits uneasily alongside a body of scientific research. Prior studies have associated shale gas production with elevated particulate matter and volatile organic compounds. In addition to air pollution, impacts on local water resources warrant scrutiny, too. If the rationale for shale gas is to displace coal in electricity production, its water usage for the cooling systems in thermoelectric power plants should be part of the environmental conversation, particularly as droughts intensify in many parts of the world. In a previous study, my coauthor Melissa McCracken and I quantify these cooling-water withdrawals for retrofitted coal-fired power plants that utilize natural gas as fuel source and shows that gas-fueled generation still demands substantial freshwater, raising concerns for water-stressed regions. On climate change mitigation specifically, gas may burn cleaner than coal at the point of use, but methane leakage across extraction and transport can offset that advantage, given methane’s higher warming potential. Measured against renewable energy alternatives, the case for shale gas as a sustainable solution looks increasingly difficult to sustain. The fact that these narratives endure nonetheless in official state discourse reveals the power of discourse, as examined in this study. Amid changing climate and global energy politics, shale gas remains a contested component of both the U.S. and China’s efforts to secure a resilient energy future, one that calls for continued attention from scholars and policymakers.
Read the full article here.