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Oil is all we seem to want to talk about these days—$3.82 a gallon gas will do that—but the shale gas boom is still going on in much of the U.S. Ground zero—as we wrote about last year in TIME—is Pennsylvania, where some landowners have made a lot of money leasing their land for shale [...]
If you were trying to invent with a term that sounds as scary as possible, you couldn’t do better than “fracking.” That’s industry terminology for hydraulic fracturing, the process used to get at unconventional natural gas and oil contained in tight rock layers that need to be cracked open—or fractured—so drillers can get at the [...]
Is shale gas good for us or not? Most of that argument has been over the potential risks that hydrofracking for shale gas might pose to water supplies—risks that were highlighted again this week when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came to Dimock, PA, to test groundwater in the area. You might know Dimock from [...]
Given that there are already more than 2.3 million miles of pipelines in the U.S.—carrying petroleum products, chemicals and natural gas—it might seem odd that so much political energy has been expended on a proposed 1,700-mile pipeline. Yet the controversial Keystone XL pipeline—which would cross the upper Midwest to carry crude from Canadian oil sands [...]
We already know that hydraulic fracturing—the process of injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals deep into the earth to exploit the natural gas trapped inside rock—can likely help cause earthquakes. The British energy company Cuadrilla Resources admitted earlier this year that fracking operations caused a series of small quakes in Lancashire, and scientists [...]
If you report on the environmental issues surrounding hydraulic fracturing and shale natural gas, you’ll hear a certain line from gas industry representatives over and over: there has never been a documented case of groundwater contamination by fracking. There are angry homeowners who say that fracking has spoiled their water supply, and suspicious incidents across [...]
The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)—a five-member committee that governs the water resources around the Delaware River—was supposed to meet today to decide on whether hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should be allowed in the river’s watershed. There’s currently a ban on drilling for natural gas within the 13,539 sq. mi Delaware Basin, which includes land bordering [...]
I’m beginning to think solving this global warming thing is going to be really, really hard. We all know that the burning of carbon-intensive coal is just about the single biggest source of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why groups like the Sierra Club are fighting so hard to get America off coal—whether or not [...]
There are many questions surrounding the practice of shale gas drilling—and especially the hydraulic fracturing methods used to get the gas. But it really all boils down to one issue: trust. Do Americans trust gas companies to drill in a responsible way and minimize the risk of any accidents or contamination? And perhaps more importantly, [...]
Environmentalists and gas drillers alike snapped to attention when the news alert went up earlier today: the New York Times reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was ready to lift the state’s moratorium on natural gas drilling via hydraulic fracturing. The moratorium was put into place by Cuomo’s predecessor David Paterson, who signed an [...]
