NoNukes writes:
As best as I can tell, the frack spelling was indeed originated by environmentalists. It was originated by someone at Earthworks.
This is just my guess at things. The full term is hydraulic fracturing, and so I'm guessing that it frist got shortened to hydrofracturing, and then to hydrofracking, and finally to fracking. The problem with the "frac" form is that it doesn't spell well - the alternatives to "fracking" are "fracing" and "fraccing", both of which look funny. So even if Petro is right that the original abbreviated form was "frac", once it leaked out into wider use the more reasonable spelling was inevitable, which is consistent with your blaming it on an outsider group like the environmentalists.
But I believe it is even possible that Petro's preferred "frac" is just local to his own community. I was in a programming subcommunity for years where I adopted standard ways of writing code and talking about code that I assumed were universal, only to discover they were local as I began moving around.
But according to Wikipedia, "frac" is a geologic term for fractures in rock formations, so the term may have been adopted by well drillers, verbing what was originally a noun, and completely ruining my theory that fracking derives from the term hydraulic fracturing.
--Percy