{"id":13625,"date":"2015-10-20T09:23:45","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T14:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13625"},"modified":"2015-10-20T09:23:45","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T14:23:45","slug":"as-the-fracking-boom-spreads-one-watershed-draws-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13625","title":{"rendered":"As the Fracking Boom Spreads, One Watershed Draws the Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the Fracking Boom Spreads,\u00a0One Watershed Draws the Line<\/a><\/h3>\n

After spreading across Pennsylvania, fracking for natural gas has run into government bans in the Delaware River watershed. The basins of the Delaware and nearby Susquehanna River offer a sharp contrast between what happens in places that allow fracking and those that do not.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the last several years, with the hydraulic fracturing technology in hand to extract natural gas from the tight formations of the Marcellus shale, the industry moved quickly and seemingly inexorably from West Virginia and across the prized geology of Pennsylvania. State maps that designate each well with a colored dot look as if a storm of confetti has blown up from Pennsylvania\u2019s southwest, intensifying as it reaches the\u00a0state\u2019s rural and heavily forested northeast.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n
Gerry Dincher\/Flickr<\/div>\n
A wellhead in north-central Pennsylvania on a platform used for drilling natural gas.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In 2008, the state produced only two percent of the country\u2019s natural gas and the Gulf of Mexico 26 percent. By 2013 the percentages were nearly reversed: Pennsylvania produced 23 percent to the Gulf\u2019s five percent. Now some 8,000 wells in Pennsylvania produce roughly 17 billion cubic feet of gas per day, and the expectation is that within the next decade new infrastructure will double those numbers, as well as add 60,000 miles of pipeline.<\/p>\n

Only one area of Pennsylvania\u2019s Marcellus has escaped the fracking storm \u2014 the portion that lies within the watershed of the Delaware River, the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi. Four years ago the gas industry was poised to spread into the Delaware River basin, which encompasses 13,000 square miles of land in four states. The industry had signed thousands of leases with watershed landowners. And although many of those landowners\u2019 neighbors looked west at the industry\u2019s growth in the Susquehanna River basin and wanted no part of it, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) was ready to give the go-ahead.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the Fracking Boom Spreads,\u00a0One Watershed Draws the Line After spreading across Pennsylvania, fracking for natural gas has run into government bans in the Delaware River watershed. The basins of the Delaware and nearby Susquehanna River offer a sharp contrast between what happens in places that allow fracking and those that do not. Over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[10028,331,393,412,1842,619,10027,7163],"class_list":["post-13625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-delaware-river","tag-fracking","tag-gulf-of-mexico","tag-hydraulic-fracturing","tag-marcellus-shale","tag-pennsylvania","tag-susquehanna-river","tag-yale-environment-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13626,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13625\/revisions\/13626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}