How Increased Protective Buffer Zones Could Help Protect 3.6 million Pennsylvanians

Discussion

In 2012, Pennsylvania Act 13 was passed setting the current minimum protective buffer distance of 500 feet between a wellhead and an existing building, and just 300 feet between the edge of the well pad and an existing building. Scientific studies have suggested that the current protective buffer distance of 500 feet may not be enough to protect nearby residents from routine exposures to toxic substances emitted from wells such as benzene (Haley et al., 2016) and PM2.5 (Banan and Gernand, 2020). A primary recommendation of the 2020 43rd Statewide Investigating Grand Jury’s report on fracking was to expand protective buffers in Pennsylvania to 2,500 feet for residential homes and 5,000 feet for schools and hospitals. The report described the current 500 foot protective buffer requirement as “woefully inadequate.” This intervention was championed by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro when he was Attorney General. A large body of peer reviewed scientific studies has shown that living close to fracking exposes residents to high levels of pollution and is associated with increased incidence of asthma, upper respiratory symptoms, heart problems, preterm birth, birth defects, cancer, and mental health symptoms. The Grand Jury report provided supporting evidence showing the health harms associated with exposure to fracking. 

Expanding minimum protective buffers would provide better basic health protection for Pennsylvanians by reducing exposure pathways. Nearly 1.5 million people live within a threat radius of a half mile (2,640 feet) of oil and gas production activities in Pennsylvania. With over 300 new unconventional wells drilled in 2024 alone, it is important that regulations for unconventional drilling protect public health. 

Over 3.6 million Pennsylvanians live in areas overlying the Marcellus and Utica shale formations where unconventional drilling is possible, including almost 700,000 children under the age of 18. With the 2020 Census estimating that a little over 13 million people live in the Commonwealth, this means that 27%, or 1 in 3 Pennsylvanian residents are affected by protective buffer regulations.

Importantly, expanding protective buffers would not lead to a de facto ban on fracking. Over 2.2 million acres of aboveground area would remain available for potential well pad construction even with the proposed changes to protective buffer regulations. Furthermore, there would still be opportunities to access shale resources belowground in much of the same areas that are accessible now, considering the horizontal distance (“lateral”) length that is possible with current fracking technology. The fracking process begins with vertical drilling that creates a long vertical hole, then the wellbore turns horizontal (often at depths greater than 6,800 feet) and creates a horizontal underground tunnel through the target shale formation where gas can be extracted. The average lateral length was estimated at 9,000 feet as of 2019 according to Olympus Energy. Dave Elkin of the drilling company EQT has stated that the current “economic and technological limit” for a lateral is 21,000 feet, or four miles. It is also important to note that any changes to protective buffer mandates would only apply to new well permits, and no existing wells would be affected.

Figure 2. Underground areas accessible to unconventional drillers with a protective buffer of 3,281 feet. Average drilled laterals were estimated at 9,000 feet, maximum drilled laterals were estimated at 21,000 feet. Only counties and areas overlying the Marcellus and Utica Shale where fracking is not currently prohibited were included in these analyses (areas prohibiting fracking include counties within the Delaware River Basin, the City of Pittsburgh, and Allegheny County parks). This map is a geospatial estimate only and does not guarantee that the areas in yellow and orange are suitable for development, geologically or otherwise. (Sources: Microsoft Maps Building Footprints; Marcellus and Utica Shale, FracTracker Alliance)

There is broad public support from Pennsylvania residents for increased protective buffers. A September 2024 poll conducted by Upswing Research showed that 90% of responding Pennsylvania residents support stricter regulations on fracking, including increased protective buffers between fracking infrastructure and schools and hospitals. Some municipalities already have local ordinances in place that establish stronger protective buffers than the state minimum, including Oakmont Borough (2,000 feet between fracking and any lot or parcel of ground located in residential zoning districts) and Trafford Borough (2,500 feet between drilling sites and any occupied structure, with some exceptions). Cecil Township revised their oil and gas ordinance in November 2024, establishing protective buffers for new well permits of at least 2,500 feet for homes and businesses and 5,000 feet for hospitals and schools (in line with the Grand Jury recommendations). Enacting local ordinances related to protective buffers is the right of the municipality and can be an effective way to quickly and directly influence change at the local level.

A study evaluating the effectiveness of Act 13 published in 2021 found that the existence of the 500 foot protective buffer regulation did not significantly alter the siting of wells in relation to nearby buildings, with an average of 1 in 13.7 wells drilled in the time between the passage of Act 13 and June 2018 failing to meet the 500 foot requirement (Michanowicz et al., 2021). According to our calculations, over 800 wells have been drilled closer than 500 feet from a building between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2024. This means that the count of wells drilled within the existing protective buffer is now averaging 1 in 10.4. The continued drilling of new wells within the 500 foot protective buffer zone was hypothesized by Michanowicz et al. to be the result of landowner consent waivers, operator requested distance variance permits, lack of reverse setback requirements for the population encroachment of new building developments, and errors. Lack of transparency within the exemption process raises questions of proper exemption rationale and informed consent for landowners. The authors explained that another factor could be increased drilling activity on pre-existing well pads exempted from Act 13, which was seen as an underlying trend. These analyses show that exemptions that override considerations for public health affect the effectiveness of protective buffer rulemaking. 

Additionally, all future rulemaking committees should consider environmental equity in their decision-making, including the demographics and existing disproportionate environmental exposure burdens of the communities living the closest to existing and proposed well sites. As of the end of 2024, over 2,000 fracking wells have been drilled within areas designated by the DEP as environmental justice areas. These communities are composed of particularly marginalized or disadvantaged groups that face disproportionate environmental burdens and have limited access to decision-making processes regarding environmental policies. Our state government needs to address the need for increased protections in these areas in light of the elevated exposure risks already faced by these communities.

Methods

The StoryMap included in this article was a collaborative effort that incorporated legal expertise from Clean Air Council and the Environmental Integrity Project, health expertise from the Environmental Health Project, pollution visualization from Melissa Ostroff (Earthworks), stories of affected residents compiled by Lois Bower-Bjornson (Clean Air Council), and mapping and data related expertise from FracTracker Alliance.  

FracTracker Alliance analysed the impact of increasing minimum protective buffers in Pennsylvania using geospatial analysis tools available in ESRI ArcGIS Pro Ver 3.4.0. The map projection used was North America Albers Equal Area. Building footprints were downloaded from a Microsoft OpenStreetMap building footprint dataset and limited to footprints sized at 70 – 500 square meters. A limitation of this dataset is that it is compiled from building snapshots from various times, mainly from either 2019-2020 or around 2012. The lower size range was selected based on the methodology used in Michanowicz 2021, who removed “all building footprints smaller than 70 square meters (750 ft2) that likely were too small to be an occupied structure.” The upper range was derived from a manual comparison of larger building footprints with their corresponding locations on GoogleMaps to determine a conservative cutoff intended to limit footprints to non-industrial buildings. This cutoff was made at 500 square meters (5,382 square feet). In the United States, a mansion is commonly defined as a luxury home with at least 5,000 square feet of living space, and the average home size is about 2,500 square feet. Since every building footprint was not checked manually, this therefore represents an upper limit rough estimate for the effects of increasing protective buffers. Protective buffers were visualized by creating 500 and 3,281 international foot pairwise buffers around the selected building footprints. 

The area available for future drilling was estimated by creating a buffer around the area not encompassed by the proposed 3,281 foot protective buffer, then creating a buffer around that area equal to the average lateral length (9,000 feet) and maximum possible lateral length (21,000 feet or 4 miles). Excluded from this area were regions outside of the Marcellus and Utica shale where it would be nonsensical to drill and areas where fracking is not permitted in Pennsylvania, namely the Delaware River Basin, within the City of Pittsburgh, and Allegheny County Parks. The footprints of the Marcellus and Utica shale formations were sourced from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

Information pertaining to Pennsylvania unconventional wells was sourced from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, downloaded February 6, 2025. Except for the statistics on wells permitted in 2024, wells were filtered to records where the spud date was not null, and the well status indicated that the well had been drilled (active, abandoned, plugged, or inactive). The spud date was used to determine when each well was drilled. Environmental justice area designations were sourced from the DEP’s PennEnviroScreen tool. Demographic data from the 2020 Census was used at the block level to estimate the number of people affected by protective buffer regulations and obtain the size of each county in square miles. Only the regions where it would be sensible or permissible to drill was considered for the affected population analysis. Fractracker Alliance has published this methodology for estimating affected populations using census block data.

Where to Learn More

• Home | ProtectiveBuffers
• Petition to the EQB
• Fracking Science Compendium version 9
• The effect of Pennsylvania’s 500 ft surface setback regulation on siting unconventional natural gas wells near buildings: An interrupted time-series analysis
• Protect PT – Understanding Local Governments
• Environmental Integrity Pennsylvania Citizens’ Toolkit
• Implications of a 3,200-foot Setback in California – FracTracker Alliance
• Pennsylvania | The Oil & Gas Threat Map
• Oil and Gas Wells in Pennsylvania – FracTracker Alliance