I believe the author is earnest, but she is looking at things as an engineer, and from a very black-and-white mindset.

> It’s not that hydraulic fracturing is new, it’s that it’s being used in new rocks, which means it’s being used in new places.

Only engineers and historians care whether fracking was first invented six decades ago or two decades ago. Either way, if it's suddenly being on new types of rocks, with new orientations of wells (horizontal), and in places it's never been done before, and on a exponentially greater scale -- then it absolutely feels like "a new, experimental technique that hasn’t been tested, isn’t regulated, and is being tried for the first time in your backyard."

> It is not a drilling technique... Hydraulic fracturing doesn’t take place until well after the well has been drilled, cased, and cemented. It is a completion technique, to stimulate the production of the well. This is not splitting hairs, it’s a big difference; get the facts right

In the public's mind it is splitting hairs. If the technology for fracking didn't exist, there wouldn't be all these new horizontal drilling rigs in people's backyards. Of course there's a technical distinction between the two which is important to the engineers who work in the field, but when a reporter or community complains about fracking they are complaining about the drilling, fracking, byproduct, and consequences that all arise when a well is created to take advantage of fracking.

> We are not just pumping massive amounts of harmful chemicals into the earth. Fracturing fluid is generally made up of 98 percent water. The other 2 percent is chemicals ranging anywhere from acid to anti-bacterial agents (used in disinfectants), to gelling agents (used in ice cream), to friction reducers (used in cosmetics), to surfactants (used in laundry detergents).... We are pumping very small amounts of them thousands of feet below the surface and then recovering most of them when the well is flowed back.

First, if you introduce enough toxic chemicals into an aquifer to contaminate the water, no one cares whether those toxic chemicals were initially introduced as a 2% solution, 20% solution, or 0.02% solution. Second, I'm pretty sure it's not the fracking chemicals that are coming out of people's plumbing and burning spectacularly when they hold a match to the faucet, it's the extracted gas. And if fracking is causing gas and flowback from the shale to be introduced into the aquifer then that's a huge problem, regardless of the other chemicals involved.

> Hydraulic fracturing is not contaminating drinking water. These fractures are being created about 6,000 feet below the surface.... If anything is going to risk the integrity of the drinking water, point the figure at the construction of the well, the steel and concrete barrier that is built to isolate that aquifer from a flowing well.

> I fully realize that this does not exonerate the oil and gas industry, but hydraulic fracturing is the one getting all the blame for no reason, and by people who clearly need to take a physics class.

And this is the author's main point. She's not denying that the oil and gas industry is contaminating drinking water and destroying communities. She's just arguing that it's the well-builders who are screwing up, not the folks pumping in the contaminants and extracting the gas.

I'm sure the this distinction is very important to the author. She is an engineer who has done hydraulic fracturing for the world's largest oilfield service company for 10 years. She probably believes the technology is great.

But if hydraulic fracturing brings new wells to town, those wells fail, and the flowback from that fracking process ends up in the drinking water and destroys communities then no one cares about which engineer is to blame within the oilfield company. It's still the oilfield company's fault.

Edit: Tweaked some of the terms I may have been using inaccurately.