Wall Street Journal Maps Local Fracking Bans

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.

August 29, 2012 | 2:36 PM

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal maps local fracking bans

As Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court sorts out whether or not local governments have the right to zone natural gas drilling, the Wall Street Journal maps out municipal hydraulic fracturing bans in the Empire State.
There’s no drilling in New York yet, but the Cuomo Administration is expected to finalize rules regulating natural gas drilling within the coming weeks.
The paper spots trends on its map:

Communities along the Pennsylvania border have generally supported allowing fracking in the Marcellus Shale—an underground rock formation rich in natural gas.
Opposition is concentrated in central and western New York, along the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale and in the Utica Shale—regions that could be exploited for natural gas but where some say drilling will be unlikely.