In Pennsylvania, the vast majority of unconventional oil and gas activity is focused on the Marcellus Shale formation, a Devonian period deposit of black shale with a high hydrocarbon content, which requires horizontal drilling and large scale hydraulic fracturing to produce enough oil and gas to make the drilling economically viable. This formation was created […]
By Matt Kelso, Manager of Data and Technology Twice per year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) releases its unconventional oil and gas production and waste reports, which is a good opportunity to check on what’s happening with the industry as a whole. In the past, FracTracker has analyzed this data as soon as […]
By Matt Kelso, Manager of Data and Technology In a joint project with PennEnvironment earlier this month, we analyzed the number of people who live within a half-mile of active rail lines in Pennsylvania and are therefore potentially at risk of an oil train explosion similar to the recent ones in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec; Lynchburg, Virginia; and Mount Carbon, West Virginia. […]
By Matt Kelso, Manager of Data & Technology The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) publishes oil and gas well data in two different places: on their own website’s Spud Data Report, and in the Oil and Gas Locations file published on the PA Spatial Data Access repository, also known as PASDA. Because these two sources […]
By Matt Kelso, Manager of Data & Technology On January 26, 2015, the Columbian, a paper in Southwestern Washington state, reported that an oil tanker spilled over 1,600 gallons of Bakken Crude in early November 2014. The train spill was never cleaned up, because frankly, nobody knows where the spill occurred. This issue highlights weaknesses […]
By Matt Kelso, Manager of Data and Technology The FracTracker Alliance periodically takes a deeper look into the unconventional oil and gas data in Pennsylvania, in order to provide updates for some frequently requested statistics on the industry. Here we provide updated PA data and trends as of December 4, 2014. Since unconventional drilling began […]
One of the potentially troubling aspects of oil and gas development is that there are usually people who live in the vicinity of the wells. Pennsylvania now has over 8,000 active unconventional wells; there are any number of issues that can occur with these modern, industrial-scale sites, including road degradation, contaminated water, and health impacts, among […]
On July 5, 2013, the lone engineer of a Montreal, Maine, and Atlantic (MMA) train arrived in Nantes, Quebec, set both the hand and air brakes, finished up his paperwork. He then left the train parked on the main line for the night, unattended atop a long grade. Five locomotives were pulling 72 tanker cars […]
State Senator Joseph Scarnati III, from north-central Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill that would redefine the distinction between conventional and unconventional oil and gas wells throughout the state. In Section 1 of the bill, the sponsors try to establish the purpose of the legislation, making the case that: Conventional oil and gas development has a […]
Like most states, the data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection do not explicitly tell you which wells have been hydraulically fractured. They do, however, designate some wells as unconventional, a definition based largely on the depth of the target formation: An unconventional gas well is a well that is drilled into an Unconventional […]
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