Acceptance of hydraulic fracturing has been anything but uniform, but southern communities appear to be quicker to approve the natural gas drilling technique than their northeastern counterparts. "In the sparsely populated pastures of De Soto Parish in Louisiana, the ability to extract gas from shale — which can involve a process known as fracking — has been welcomed as an economic windfall," Clifford Krauss and Tom Zeller Jr. of The New York Times report. "But 1,400 miles to the north, in Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania, shale gas development has divided neighbors, spurred lawsuits and sown deep mistrust."
"Support for drilling has proved fairly easy in many states, including Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas," Krauss and Zeller write. "But it has met with major resistance in the Northeast." Lawsuits are driving up natural gas drilling production costs in Pennsylvania, where the governor recently ordered a moratorium on new drilling permits in state forests. "They have been drilling oil and gas wells in the South for the last 100 years," Jerry Dugas, a well superintendent for Cabot Oil and Gas in Pennsylvania, told the reporters. "Everyone there is accustomed to seeing all of this stuff and they understand what’s going on, so it’s nothing new. That’s the environment I grew up in."
"Once I came up here [to Pennsylvania]," he added, "it became real clear to me real quick that this is a whole other animal." Southern communities affected by the shale gas boom are more accustomed to the boom-and-bust cycle of the drilling industry, the reporters write. The region hasn't been spared from drilling accidents that have caused controversy in the northeast, but local outcry has been relatively slim. "There was no reaction, really," Charlie Waldon, the mayor of the tiny Stonewall, La., told the reporters. "It’s going to take something major to wake them up." (Read more)
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