Hancock and the Marcellus Shale

With the publication, Hancock & The Marcellus Shale: Visioning the Impacts of Natural Gas Extraction Along the Upper Delaware, the team evaluates and visualizes the impacts of natural gas drilling in the Delaware River watershed on the local economy and the local environment. Natural gas hydraulic fracturing, a new technique for extracting natural gas from within deep shale deposits, has the capacity to alter lifestyle and landscape at a scale not seen in the Catskills since the creation of the New York City Watershed system. Requiring almost a million gallons of freshwater per day (with chemical additives) for each operating well, natural gas hydraulic fracturing creates the ability to exploit large natural gas reserves in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, now estimated at 500 trillion cubic feet, which were previously considered inaccessible.