Fracking

By Josh Fox Anti-Fracking Campaigners: We Won’t Be Silenced Gasland was intended to be both a chronicle of the way in which oil and gas companies have used vast sums of money to shield fracking from virtually all federal, state, and local regulations and a cautionary tale about the toll the process takes on people and the environment. Fortunately, the message of the film is getting through. Recent surveys show that 4 out of 5 Americans are concerned about fracking’s effect on our drinking water and seven out of ten Ohioans believe the process should be stopped until we know more about its effect on the environment and its relation to a series of earthquakes that have rocked the Northeastern part of the state. ...

By Adam Federman On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in water. ...

As controversial drilling for shale gas continues in Lancashire, Peter Marshall travels to the United States to see first hand how life has changed for people who have spent years living with fracking. Bradford County, Pennsylvania, is one of the most fracked places on the planet. Its gas-rush, which began in earnest in 2008, has seen around 600 wells drilled deep into the Marcellus Shale. The county seat is the town of Towanda. If you want to know what a gas-rush does to an area there is no better place to look for answers. ...