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Pennsylvania Calls for More Water Tests
Posted by New York Times: Ian Urbina on April 8th, 2011
New York Times: Pennsylvania environmental regulators said Wednesday that they were calling for waste treatment plants and drinking water facilities to increase testing for radioactive pollutants and other contaminants, to see whether they are ending up in rivers because of the growth of natural gas drilling in the state.
The move follows a March 7 letter that the federal Environmental Protection Agency sent to the state, instructing it to perform testing for radioactivity within 30 days and to review the permits...
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E.P.A. Struggles to Regulate Natural Gas Industry
Posted by New York Times: Ian Urbina on March 3rd, 2011
New York Times: When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled. But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987. “It was like the science didn’t matter,”...
Drilling Down: Regulation Is Lax for Water From Gas Wells
Posted by New York Times: Ian Urbina on February 27th, 2011
New York Times: The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas. The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating...