Under the Surface:Fracking, Fortunes, and theFateof the Marcellus Shale

摘要

Last Month news outlets reported a potentially major new finding based on a study carried out by the U.S. Geological Survey. Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," the ascendant but controversial technology for extracting natural gas from shale formations deep in the ground, may be responsible—albeit indirectly, through the pumping of fracking wastewater deep underground—for the dramatic increase in minor earthquakes across the Midwest since 2009. And so it is that Under the Surface is even timelier than it otherwise would have been as fracking increasingly becomes a flash point in the debate about balancing the development of domestic energy sources with environmental stewardship. Author Tom Wilber, a 20-year newspaper reporting veteran and a resident of up-state New York, has spent years researching and conducting interviews on the discovery and development of the potentially vast natural gas reserves locked in the Marcellus Formation.