In the State of the Union address in late January, President Obama offered his support to further develop natural gas as an energy source and stated that “my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.” The President also underscored that this development requires environmental safeguards. He added: “I’m requiring all companies [...]
The use of hydraulic fracturing in shale gas development took center stage Friday as a panel of U.S. and Canadian experts discussed the contentious practice in a three-hour symposium hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The panel, moderated by Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, former Under Secretary for Science in the [...]
Fracking may not seem like the sexiest topic (the term refers to a method used to extract oil and natural gas), but one husband-and-wife filmmaker team is hoping to give it some big-screen appeal through a new documentary. Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, the Irish pair behind the 2008 documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong,” which [...]
When a large tanker truck pulls up to a fire hydrant in Greeley, Colo. — a midsize town on the semiarid Eastern Slope of the Rocky Mountains — and starts siphoning water from the city’s supply, passersby start looking nervous. Chances are good the tanker is on its way to an oil or natural gas [...]
Stephen Ewart, Calgary Herald’s Energy and Economics editor and columnist, delves into the communication uncertainty that plagues the hydraulic fracturing debate: As provincial authorities continue to investigate the blowout of an oil well in central Alberta that’s been linked to a nearby hydraulic fracturing operation, the incident appears to have been another case of bad [...]
A group of the nation’s leading experts on energy and the environment are at Duke this week attending a workshop to try to ferret out the facts (and tamp down the hype) around shale gas and fracking, the controversial method for extracting natural gas trapped in shale deposits. With yesterday’s sessions held as a public [...]
The British Columbia government made good on its promise to provide online details starting Jan. 1 about chemicals being pumped underground by the oil and gas industry when it activated a database called FracFocus.ca. But companies involved in hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract oil and gas won’t be required to post information until 30 [...]
Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc., a subsidiary of Encana Corporation, strongly disagrees with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‘s (EPA) damning preliminary conclusions in its draft report related to the groundwater study in the Pavillion natural gas field of Wyoming. The EPA’s data from existing domestic water wells aligns with all previous testing done by [...]
There’s been a real cluster-frack of buzz over the release Thursday of a 121-page draft report from the EPA claiming that chemical contaminants found in deep water aquifers in Pavilion, Wyoming were likely put there by hydraulic fracking. Anti-frackers are calling this a game-changer that could finally turn the tide of public opinion solidly against [...]
The town of Dimrock in northeastern Pennsylvania was propelled into the public eye by the documentary, “Gasland”. In the movie, producer Josh Fox profiled families able to light their tap water on fire as well, suffering from numerous health issues and fearing their well water had been contaminated, all purportedly from shale gas drilling in [...]
