A Natural Gas Timeline

Susan Phillips

Recent Stories

Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

April 2, 2012 | 4:27 PM

Mother Jones magazine has put together a handy timeline from the discovery of natural gas deposits in upstate New York in 1825, to last month, when actor and New York resident Mark Ruffalo launched his official campaign against fracking. There’s a big gap though, nothing seems to have happened in the natural gas world for 115 years between 1825 and the 1940’s. But President Jimmy Carter’s sweater makes an appearance, along with Governor Milton Shapp’s decision to close schools because of a natural gas shortage in 1977.