Over the last few years, Pennsylvania has witnessed a New Age Industrial Revolution, as Natural Gas Companies heading northeast, from Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming, arrive in rural communities in Pennsylvania, promoting gas drilling as the safer, cheaper, greener alternative to oil and coal. On the surface, it seems to hold promise for many, but digging deeper, important environmental questions have been raised about the safety of this new natural gas drilling technology, and whether it can bring relief to Pennsylvania’s depressed economic condition, without endangering public health or the environment.

The Delaware River Basin serves four states: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, and supplies drinking water for 15.6 million people – about 5% of the US population. Thanks to years of restoration and protection, right now, the Delaware is considered one of the cleanest rivers in the nation, but if natural gas industry advocates have their way, the pristine condition of our watershed could be in jeopardy very soon. The Delaware River was designated the nation’s Most Endangered River of 2010, due to the looming threat of gas drilling

When it was discovered that Pennsylvania had a vast underground reservoir of natural gas, in the state’s southwestern, north-central and northeastern regions, hidden deep within a rock formation called the Marcellus Shale, gas industry leaders jumped on the drilling bandwagon. Governor Corbett’s administration quickly joined the industry in touting this movement as Pennsylvania’s "Gas Rush." The Marcellus formation is considered by industry-insiders to be the panacea to Pennsylvania’s deficit dilemma. Although a relative late-comer to the gas boom, according to Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission’s Feb 2010 Natural Gas Report, as of 2007, Pennsylvania already had 52, 700 producing gas wells; second only to Texas in numbers. Although natural gas companies claim that this energy source has just one-half the carbon footprint of coal, a new study released in Climatic Science contradicts this claim, saying that shale gas has a bigger carbon footprint than coal in the short term, and is comparable over the long-term.

Although drilling for natural gas has been around for about 100 years, the evolution of this technology is responsible for the current gas boom. In the 1940’s, Halliburton created a method of oil and gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing. This is a means of extraction employed in deep drilling where, once a well is drilled, millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals are injected into the well, under extremely high pressure. The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable the natural gas to flow more freely out of the well, dramatically improving each well’s productivity and profitability.