The City Council of Philadelphia requested on Thursday that a state regulator ban hydraulic fracturing until its environmental effects are studied.
Hydraulic fracturing-also known as fracking-is a natural-gas drilling technique that has been known to have harmful effects on drinking water.
Philadelphia officials are asking the Delaware River Basin Commission to deny a drilling permit to Stone Energy Corp, a Louisiana-based oil and gas company that wants to conduct fracking in the watershed that supplies Philadelphia's drinking water.
Stone Energy has applied for a permit to drill for gas, extracting the water it needs from a tributary of the Delaware River.
Tim O'Leary, a spokesman for Stone Energy, claims that fracking poses no threat to water supplies.
A commission consisting of representatives from Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, is charged with protecting the river over about 330 miles from its headwaters to the Delaware Bay.
Oil and gas companies have signed numerous drilling leases in both New York and Pennsylvania, where a major natural gas reserve has been identified in a geological formation known as the Marcellus Shale.
New York city officials have called on state authorities to prevent drilling in the city watershed due to concern about possible ground water contamination from hydraulic fracturing.
Congress has also gotten involved, introducing a bill that would require energy companies to disclose chemicals they use in fracking.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has expressed serious reservations about the prospect of fracking in the New York City watershed.
On March 18 the EPA announced its plan to conduct a national study of the process of hydraulic fracturing.
The $6 million study will span two years and will be the first of its kind.
EPA officials are using $1.9 million from this year's budget to begin the work, and are requesting money from Congress in the 2011 budget to complete it.
The EPA research will be designed to answer questions about the potential impact of hydraulic fracturing on human health and the environment.
Those opposed to fracking say that gas drilling in the Delaware basin threatens the drinking water of 15 million people, 2 million alone in the Philadelphia region.
Energy companies that want to drill for shale gas in Pennsylvania and other states claim that there has never been a proven case of water contamination from fracking.
They defend the process saying that the toxic chemicals are injected through layers of steel and concrete thousands of feet below drinking-water aquifers.
Hopefully, the EPA's upcoming study will help to clarify these disparities.
Until next time,
Hilary
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