Fracking in Pennsylvania

This project examines fracking through the lens of environmental harm. We briefly describe the entanglement between the industries Pittsburgh is well known for and the rise of fossil fuel extraction. We go on to explain what fracking is and how it is harming the environment. We then have a data driven exploration of the current state of fossil fuels in Pennsylvania with interactive maps.

After the reader begins to understands our current situation of fossil fuels, we have a deep dive into the origins of fossil fuels through the lens of decoloniality scholarship. This exploration of the origins of fossil capitalism has a systems theory framing which connects large global concepts to each other. We have set up the article in a way that allows most readers to engage with fracking in Pennsylvania in an interactive way, and for more interested readers start to understand the larger concepts that connect many of these systems.

Use the tabs at the top of the screen to jump around and explore the article.

1. How extensive is fracking and other fossil fuel infrastructure in Pennsylvania?

2. Where are the environmental harms in Pennsylvania from fracking, and how extensive are they?

One of the many regions where fossil fuel extraction and capitalism have had mutually reinforcing behavior is in Pittsburgh, where steel and other heavy industry exploited the land under a unforgiving regime of growth and development. 

With the region’s fossilized carbon and mineral rich geologic layers right near the surface, Pittsburgh was launched into an industrial culture from coal extraction in the late 19th century. The steel industry was the most dominant in the area and defined Pittsburgh as “...one of the world’s great industrial powers” (Tarr and Clay, Pittsburgh as an Energy Capital, 5). Pollution of the river and air is somewhat obvious because of the visibility they have, billowing clouds of coal smoke and murky sulphuric water. But what is less obvious are the environmental harms that are out of sight, such as acid from coal mines polluting ground water and in fact the “mine acid...still continues to be a major problem today” (Tarr and Clay, Pittsburgh as an Energy Capital, 12).

At the same time as Pittsburgh's steel industry was booming and polluting, the exploration and enclosures of land in Pennsylvania for oil and gas grew exponentially. The graphic in Fig. 06 plots the territorial expansion of all the documented oil and gas wells from when permitting data began recording in 1901, bringing a jarring image of over 190,000 wells onto the map.

For each one of the 190,000+ wells in the graphic above, there is a site of extraction on the landscape. Even though many of those wells are no longer active and have been plugged, they contributed to a decentralized network of pollution and environmental harms, from deforestation/clear-cutting to make open space for the well pads, to the inevitable leaching of toxins into the groundwater, similar to the coal mines. The graphic below shows a fracking well and the harms it has placed on the environment. The left side of the image is in 2008, right before the fracking boom took hold in Pennsylvania. The right side shows the fracking pad, the cleared forest and the constructed water basin used to inject the fracking fluid into the earth.

Fracking, short for "hydraulic fracturing" is a drilling operation to extract gas, such as methane, from shale formations thousands of feet below the surface of the earth. Shale are a kind of geologic formation that are ubiquitous across the globe, characterized by thin sheets of compressed sediment that have hardened into rock-like structures. The unique factor of shale that is thousands of feet below the surface is there's often gas trapped between the individual sheets in the shale formation.

While conventional gas wells are drilled straight down and access an underground reservoir of fossil fuels, fracking wells are drilled between 6,000-10,00 feet deep and then extend horizontally up to 10,000 feet. Explosives in what is called a Perforation Gun blow through the steel well sleeve along the horizonal arm. Fracking fluid containing a multitude of chemicals is injected at extremally high pressure into the fractured shale releasing the trapped gas to be pulled up the well bore. We can see now the environmental harms go beyond the clear cutting of forest around the well sites but also the ground water has been contaminated, enormous amounts of methane have escaped from well sites, and the millions of gallons of water injected into each well need to be safely decontaminated.

One incidents in Wyoming County Pennsylvania, saw the fracking equipment malfunction causing the injection fluid to spray into the air. The surround area had to evacuate to avoid prolonged contact with the airborne fluid until the well site could be brought under control.

Since many homes in rural Pennsylvania rely on private wells for their drinking water, they do not have the access to industrial water treatment centers that urban areas provide. When the fracking boom started in 2008, many rural families were shocked to see they could ignite the water from their faucet. In these cases, fracking operations nearby had contaminated the groundwater with fossil fuel gases the drinking wells were pulling from.

We are interested in the spatial qualities of fracking as it is connected to the larger systems of fossil fuels. Showing charts that represent abstract quantitative data was not important for our narrative, and there is plenty of those kinds of representation  online . Maps showing the data dispersed across the landscape have a strong visual impact and it allows the reader to engage in more qualitative ways with the data.

We started mapping data only in SW Pennsylvania using the ArcGIS Pro platform. We were originally interested in the diametric relationship of the network of decentralized oil and gas wells, while the corporate control was centralized. Yes, that was interesting but it didn't reveal much about the environmental harms these fossil fuel systems create.

Although ArcGIS Pro is quite a sophisticated tool that allowed us create beautiful and informative maps, it is in a very closed ecosystem that makes it difficult for outside user input, and the data interaction is fairly limited to view only (with some minor interaction). In the process of this project we found Kepler GL, a front-end platform that runs off a Mapbox back-end. Kepler GL allowed for much more interaction, and more importantly, it allowed the readers to upload their own data. We imagine the interested individuals or perhaps policy makers could add their own data in relation with the pre loaded oil and gas data we have provided and encoded.

All the maps are fully interactive, allowing the reader to change the encodings of the data (color, size, point -> heatmap, etc.) and even add their own data (CSV, JSON or geoJSON file formats).

The concept Coloniality of Power as developed primarily (but not exclusively) by Anibal Quijano articulates the legacy of physical and governmental colonization in contemporary societies. In a broad sense, the legacy of coloniality has very tangible traces in today’s political, social, and economic structures; racism, privileging Western production of knowledge, using development/progress as a geopolitical tool of imperialism for extraction and subjugation, and devaluing and rendering invisible reproductive labor, to name just a few. Decoloniality scholar Ramon Grosfoguel articulates the progression of the hegemonic world order, “We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century characterization of ‘people without history,’ to the twentieth-century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty-first-century of ‘people without democracy’.” (Grosfoguel, Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy, 7). I will briefly focus on three issues/areas of coloniality as they relate closely with energy systems: racism, labor/capitalism, and production of knowledge (epistemologies).

Quijano articulates how many of these conditions of capital, labor, race, and history existed around the world in pre-modern times, but only in fragments and they were not systemically assembled together under one organizing regime with a hegemonic center. People for instance, were most likely discriminated against based on the color of their skin in pre-modern times, however, racism was not structured as a hereditary precondition of carcerality that was used as a mechanism of subjugation. Quijano specifies that “the idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the colonization of the Americas.” (Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, 534). The way the emerging regime of capitalism used race as a method of subjugation to produce cheap/free labor through serfdom and slavery was a condition uniquely created in the Americas. Quijano goes on to say “...all of these forms of labor were part of a new model of organization and labor control” (Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, 550), which evolved into contemporary capitalism. As we will see later in the research, systemic racism is still lingering in our energy systems today.

Similar to the agenda of modernity, the Eurocentrism Quijano writes of has an agenda to privilege the knowledge and development of Europe as both a linear trajectory and the only possible way a society can produce knowledge and develop. In a more nuanced touch though, Quijano writes, Eurocentrism is a “...specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much in Europe as in the rest of the world.” (Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, 549-550). The production of knowledge, or an epistemology, therefore is a task only set by the Western hegemonic structures which will be explored a little more later in the research

Similar to the agenda of modernity, the Eurocentrism Quijano writes of has an agenda to privilege the knowledge and development of Europe as both a linear trajectory and the only possible way a society can produce knowledge and develop. In a more nuanced touch though, Quijano writes, Eurocentrism is a “...specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much in Europe as in the rest of the world.” (Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, 549-550). The production of knowledge, or an epistemology, therefore is a task only set by the Western hegemonic structures which will be explored a little more later in the research.

Agricultural production was the origin of our current energy paradigm. Sheller writes it was, in fact, modernity’s globalizing and intensification of energy production “...through the transatlantic slave trade and plantation complex” (Sheller, The Origins of Global Carbon Form, 59) that began our current period of Carbon Form. Sheller goes on to quote Monique Allewaert, Pablo F.Gomez, and Gregg Mitman who author Plantation Legacies, “The plantation… was the “synthesis of field and factory” an agro-industrial system of enterprise integral to the historic rise and growth of capitalism” (Sheller, The Origins of Global Carbon Form, 60).

The plantation complex and the slave trade were mutually reinforcing systems that produced a lasting rupture in the global social and economic systems driven by a Western hegemonic modernity. One of the most powerful quotes that Sheller uses to tie energy and capitalism together is again from Plantation Legacies, “...it was in these cultivated economies of the Caribbean “where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the bases of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human being on a planetary scale” (Sheller The Origins of Global Carbon Form, 60-61).

Continuing from the agricultural and plantation argument from Sheller, Elisa Irtube writes about the rise of fossil fuels mapping onto the geographies of intensified energy production and the “...unprecedented condition of energy abundance, which in turn led to major changes in the social order, sparking a new phase in the development of capitalism…” (Irtube, Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity, 13). Since Western hegemonic modernity began to restructure global power dynamics and subjugate millions of people to extract their labor for a more energy dense globalized world, it made sense that carbon fuels followed the same structural logic of extraction and exploitation because they were both products of modernity. To reinforce the concept of the marriage between our fossil energy paradigm and our common sense understanding of our world, Irtube quotes the geographer Andreas Malm from his book Fossil Capital, “The fossil economy has the character of a totality: a distinguishable entity: a socio-ecological structure, in which a certain economic process and certain form of energy are welded together” (Irtube, Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity, 13).

One of the reasons why energy is so malleable and can be applied to so many aspects of capitalism and modernity is because our contemporary perception of energy is actually an epistemology, not a hard science as most of the engineering fields and politics would have us believe. That is the thesis of Cara Daggett in her book The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. 

Daggett argues the birth or discovery of energy in Britain in the 18th century has played a fundamental role in defining our modern conceptions of work and efficiency, bringing all three concepts into relation with one another and influencing politics and economics.

When Lord Kelvin and other engineers were trying to make the steam engine produce more work (what we now call efficiency) they found they were reaching the limit of their knowledge. They understood the heat from burning coal, and the pistons moving were representations of the same phenomenon—energy, but they couldn't understand the relationship that “...coal could move pistons, but a moving piston could not make coal.” (Cederlöf, Review of Daggett, Cara New. 2019. The Birth of Energy, 2). The concept of energy flowing in a linear direction from usable to unusable (energy to entropy) looks remarkably similar to the construction of history in modernity where there is only one linear possible trajectory for the development of humanity. Indeed, These earlier ideas of energy are heavily imbued with anthropocentric ideas of productivity, Daggett argues “The two concerns—waste and the dissipation of energy into unusable forms—resonated not only with the capitalist drive for profit, but also with long-standing theological obsessions in Protestantism with sin and sloth” (Daggett, The Birth of Energy, 36). It was only until the 20th century when concepts of ecology and systems thinking emerged that the idea of unusable energy was beginning to be questioned as a mechanistic framing, meaning that lost energy was only unusable to humans, and productive humans at that. But by that time the concept of a productive energy had become far too entangled with capitalism, blending with ideas of freedom, especially in the United States. The political narratives that have followed energy and fossil fuel in the United States depict notions of an individualistic, self reliant, energy independent nation as the only true form of independence (Daggett, Environmental Justice Conference, Video).

We stand on stolen land. The land Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University stands on is stolen. This land is home to the Osage Nation and the Tula Nation, and others before them.