Burning Question: What Marcellus Shale Well is Closest to Philadelphia?

• Susan Phillips
  BioRecent 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.

This blog post is part of StateImpact’s on-going, reader-submitted burn­ing ques­tions about nat­ural gas drilling.  So far, we have tack­led water test­ing, whether or not frack­ing can lead to earth­quakes, the sta­tus of the state’s deep injec­tion wells, all things water and the fate of a quarantined herd of beef cattle.
Today’s question comes from Kristen Mosbrucker. Mosbrucker wants to know where the closest Marcellus Shale natural gas well is to Philadelphia. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources makes answering this question pretty easy. They have a map of all permitted Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania as of August, 2011. The closest wells are in Columbia County, which is about a 3 hour drive from Philadelphia. The wells are clustered together in the northern part of the county, about 111 miles from downtown Philadelphia. Six of these wells are operated by XTO Energy, and two by Williams Production Appalachia.
In addition to the closest well to Philly, Mosbrucker wants to know how many Pennsylvania owned gas drilling companies operate in the state and who are they? We looked at DEP data and calculated that more than half of the Marcellus Shale wells operating in the state are owned by out-of-state companies. Many of them have registration addresses in Pennsylvania, but with deeper digging, we found their main headquarters are often located in Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, California, and Alberta, Canada. The list of in-state drillers is long, but Pittsburgh’s EQT has the largest number of wells.
Mosbrucker also asked about the role of the Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission. (clicking on the link will take you to our explainer page.) The Commission has already met and made their recommendations to Governor Corbett, who has issued his proposals, including an impact fee.

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