America's Fracking Boom Spreads

With the President’s push for clean energy, fracking is about get a whole lot bigger in America. We’ll look at the mega-build-up coming in fracking.

The meltdown in Iraq right now hardly makes the Middle East look like a calm energy source.  And the President’s big push for lower emissions at home will not be met by solar and wind alone.  Far from it.  This country is poised to go after a lot more domestic natural gas.  And for better or worse, that means a lot more fracking.  Call it mega-fracking.  Many Americans have not taken onboard just how mightily this industry is gearing up for further vast growth, from well-head to transport to processing and pipelines.  This hour On Point:  future projection – fracking in overdrive.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Dennis Berman, business editor at The Wall Street Journal. (@dkberman)

Mark Zoback, professor in earth sciences and senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University's School of Earth Sciences.

Kate Sinding, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Community Fracking Defense Project. (@KateSinding)

The Wall Street Journal: Are We Underestimating America's Fracking Boom? — "Start with exotic Nazi technology, take a detour with South African apartheidists, and add a bit role for Iranian imams. What you have is—what else? —one of the most improbable and important American business stories of the past decade."

News & Observer: Fracking? NC's geology doesn't support it --"Both the pro-fracking and the anti-fracking people ignore the geology of North Carolina. Petroleum (oil and gas) experts, however, do not ignore it. The Energy Information Agency of the U.S government shows large areas that fracking opens to oil and gas production. The largest is the Marcellus-Utica complex of western New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and West Virginia. Numerous other areas are scattered to the west. None of them is east of the southern Appalachians, and the EIA shows nothing in North Carolina."

New Orleans Times-Picayune: St. Tammany Parish Council will wage court fight against fracking — "In front of a large sign-carrying, anti-fracking crowd, the St. Tammany Parish Council decided Thursday night to go to court to fight a proposed oil drilling project near Mandeville. By unanimous vote, the council adopted a resolution to hire outside attorneys to seek a court judgment and injunction to block the state Department of Natural Resources' Office of Conservation from issuing drilling permits in St. Tammany."