Check Out StateImpact Pennsylvania's Updated Drilling App

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.

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