PA Unconventional Drilling Activity Trends

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) publishes data on unconventional oil and gas permits, drilled wells, and violations. The FracTracker Alliance has taken this data, and summarized it by month:

Permits issued, wells drilled, and violations issued for unconventional oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania from January 2005 through May 2013.

Permits issued, wells drilled, and violations issued for unconventional oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania from January 2005 through May 2013.

There are numerous ways to interpret the raw data, to the point where it is easy to get bogged down in the specifics. Still, a certain amount of discussion is merited to understand that answers to questions like, “How many unconventional oil and gas violations are there in Pennsylvania?” are fundamentally interpretive in nature, based on the available data. For example, there are often multiple actions for a single well API number that appear in the permits report, and likewise multiple actions for a single violation ID number that has been issued. In this analysis, we have counted only the first action for each of these.

Here are some more summary details about the data:

This table shows a summary of unconventional oil and gas data in PA by month.

This table shows a summary of unconventional oil and gas data in PA by month.

The top section shows summaries of monthly counts of permits, drilled wells, and violations, while the second section shows the frequency of the monthly totals reaching specified targets, and the third section shows the total numbers that were used for the analysis.  For example, we can see in the top section that the maximum number of violations issued in a month is 160, so there are zero instances where the monthly total of violations reached the target of being greater than 200.  And while there have been four months since January 2005 where there have been no unconventional permits issued in the state (the most recent being in September 2005, incidentally), this has happened 21 times on the violations report.

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