Natural Gas Fracking Around the U.S.: End-of-Year Recap

Fracking has been a hot topic in the news lately: citizens across the country are worried about their environment and drinking water safety, and some states have similar concerns and are acting on them, and some aren't.

Citizens from Pennsylvania to Colorado are worried about groundwater contamination. Of the roughly half of Americans who know anything about fracking, most are concerned about its effects.

New York has ordered a temporary moratorium on one type of fracking (which on the surface sounds promising and forward-thinking, but some are worried it will just be a stepping stone to much more fracking of both kinds—horizontal and vertical wells—later).

Proposed regulations, meanwhile, to move forward with fracking in the nearby Delaware River Basin have let down a lot of people who were hoping the commission would act differently.

Pittsburgh and some smaller municipalities in both Pennsylvania and New York, all Marcellus Shale territory, have banned fracking, or at least the dumping of wastewater from fracking within their borders.

Wyoming has taken perhaps the biggest step, with the NY Times reporting that state regulators ordered "the country's most detailed disclosures of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing," chemicals that are normally kept from the public as trade secrets. Now that information "is available to anyone with an Internet connection now that Wyoming is demanding that drillers disclose each chemical that they are putting in each well."