Is shale gas good for us or not? Most of that argument has been over the potential risks that hydrofracking for shale gas might pose to water supplies—risks that were highlighted again this week when the Environmental …
Natural Gas
“We can have this conversation, but you cannot show me one place — not one! — where there is a proven pollution of groundwater by hydraulic fracturing. I am truly offended that the American public would be hoodwinked by stories that do not scientifically hold up.”
Fracking: Sizing Up the Quakes That Come from Hydraulic Fracturing
We already know that hydraulic fracturing—the process of injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals deep into the earth to exploit the natural gas trapped inside rock—can likely help cause earthquakes. The British …
Contaminated? EPA Says Fracking “Likely” Polluted Groundwater
If you report on the environmental issues surrounding hydraulic fracturing and shale natural gas, you’ll hear a certain line from gas industry representatives over and over: there has never been a documented case of groundwater …
Political Fractures Over Fracking
The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)—a five-member committee that governs the water resources around the Delaware River—was supposed to meet today to decide on whether hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should be …
Natural Gas Can Save the Climate? Not Exactly
I’m beginning to think solving this global warming thing is going to be really, really hard. We all know that the burning of carbon-intensive coal is just about the single biggest source of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why groups like the Sierra Club are fighting so hard to get America off coal—whether or not we burn …
Is Siberia Becoming China’s One-Stop Energy Shop?
“In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold.”
So Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of his years of hard labor in 19th century Siberia, after a jittery Tsar Nicholas I banished the famed writer to the lonely Far East. For centuries, the massive swath of land east of Moscow and north of China has been a place of political …
Is New York About to Get Fracking? Not Exactly
Environmentalists and gas drillers alike snapped to attention when the news alert went up earlier today: the New York Times reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was ready to lift the state’s moratorium on natural gas drilling via hydraulic fracturing. The moratorium was put into place by Cuomo’s predecessor David Paterson, …
The Benefits and Costs of a “Golden Age” of Natural Gas and Fracking
Shale natural gas—usually the most boring of fuels—has been one of the hottest energy topics in 2011, alternately lionized as a cleaner-burning and plentiful power source and demonized as a poisoner of local water supplies, and even worse for the climate than coal. That debate will continue to run hot—just last week New York …
A Musical Introduction to Fracking
As science journalists (nominally, at least), we’re in the business of explaining things here at Ecocentric. Climate change, air pollution, offshore oil drilling, species loss—these are all complex subjects that require some background knowledge, for both journalist and reader, before we even get to the news of the day. The challenge …