Texas And Colorado Tackle Fracking In Their Own Way

There are plenty of similarities in the ongoing fracking debate in Texas and Colorado, but the parallels end when it comes to how oil companies and politicians are dealing with the public’s questions. While concerned residents and anti-fracking groups fight to regulate or ban fracking, oil companies in each state have responded in their own way, as Zain Shauk and Bradley Olson reported for Bloomberg Business Week:
In Texas, drillers are doing their noisy in-your-face fracking as usual. Meanwhile, on a small farm about an hour from the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the oil industry is giving fracking a makeover, cutting back on rumbling trucks and tamping down on pollution. Of course, the fracking battle is not limited to these two states. Various cities and counties across the country have passed 430 measures to ban or restrict the practice, according to Food and Water Watch.

IE Questions: Fossil Fuel Primer

“Fossil fuel” is not exactly an obscure term. Most people have the basic understanding that fossil fuels–coal, oil and natural gas–were formed from the buried remains of ancient plants and animals, submerged under heat and pressure for hundreds of millions of years. But, just because they’re formed by the same process, doesn’t mean they are all one and the same.

Saltwater Spills In North Dakota: Data Woes And Wins

As oil booms in North Dakota, the rate of spills has been growing, Emily Guerin reported. Thousands of barrels of oil spill each year, but something more dangerous comes with it: saltwater. A by-product of oil extraction, saltwater can destroy farmland for years. Finding detailed data on saltwater spills – more than 800 happened in North Dakota in the past year – was hard. Really hard.