November 4, 2013
Drilling conflicts are almost always described in the context of their impacts on air, water and health. But increasingly, as the drilling boom sweeps the country, another part of the drilling story is starting to bubble up in drilling hotspots like Colorado, Pennsylvania, New York, Wyoming and Texas (check out this map to see all the shale gas in play in North America).
Increasingly, oil and gas development is butting up against, and often trampling, the bedrock American principles of property rights and the value of one’s home.“You could end up where someone puts a drilling platform on that property. We’d have to tell their neighbors, ‘We’re sorry, your property value just went down.’”–Jim Blaine, President & CEO of State Employees’ Credit Union in North Carolina, which decided this year to no longer approve mortgages on properties where the mineral rights are severed from the property.
Industry estimates peg the number new wells that will be drilled across the U.S. over the next decade at more than 200,000. In this rush to tap once unreachable deposits, oil and gas development is pushing the boundaries of drilling. Innovations like fracking and horizontal drilling mean nothing is out of reach. Once the province of wide open spaces, drilling rigs now regularly inch up and even into communities that never anticipated having to address problems like round-the-clock noise, storage tanks, drums of toxic chemicals, noxious fumes, and pipelines near homes, schools, playgrounds and parks.