Check Out StateImpact Pennsylvania's Updated Drilling App

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

March 7, 2012 | 11:07 AM

StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale drilling app has gotten a lot more crowded. (Click on the above image to view it.)
The interactive map, which tracks the state’s producing Marcellus Shale wells, is based on the Department of Environmental Protection’s most recent production report. When we first launched the page in December, it visualized the 1,608 wells that produced natural gas between January and June 2011.
Now that DEP has released information for July-December, 2,200 wells appear on the page. Northeast Pennsylvania appears much more crowded, as Bradford County overtook Washington as the commonwealth’s top drilling hot spot during the last six months of 2011. The county’s producing well totals increased by 52 percent, to 366, while extracted gas jumped up by more than 34 percent. ((For more information on how Pennsylvania’s drilling landscape changed between June and December 2011, click here.)

Some background on the app: just click on a well, and you’ll learn who owns it, and whether Department of Environmental Protection inspectors have cited it for violations. Problem-free wells are green on the map. If inspectors have cited a site for violations, it’s plotted as an orange dot — and the citation details are listed on the page.
The app tracks producing wells, not spudded wells. That means it only includes wells currently churning out natural gas.
Every single well has its own page, so you can link to them or share them via Twitter and Facebook. If you think there’s more we need to know about the drilling site, there’s a space for you to share comments, stories or pictures.
The app helps answer broader questions, too. Trying to figure out who the biggest players are, or what areas are drilling hot spots? You can navigate to wells by county, municipality or operator to learn that information.