The Delaware River fracking ban is important and necessary.

To begin with the Delaware River touches many states and it is nearly impossible to prevent Pennsylvania pollution from enter New Jersey waters.

Fracking is a very crude and dirty process and once it starts there will be a lot of violations into the water quality of that river. This demand to frack that land is irresponsible with no basis in need.

February 7, 2021
By Andrew Maykuth

More than a decade (click here) after environmentalists and landowners first formed battle lines over natural gas drilling in the Delaware River basin, the prolonged fight over fracking is finally heading to a resolution in a Scranton courtroom.

U.S. District Judge Robert D. Mariani last month set an October trial date to hear a challenge to the drilling moratorium imposed in 2010 by the Delaware River Basin Commission, the interstate agency that manages water use in the vast Delaware watershed. A Wayne County landowner group alleges that the DRBC doesn’t have jurisdiction over gas drilling....

The DRBC is a very legal entity created in the 1960s by President John F. Kennedy. Pennsylvania does not have the right to unilaterally frack the river basin. Not only that, but, Pennsylvania has the federal government as a partner as well.

A breakthrough in water resources management (click here) occurred in 1961 when President Kennedy and the governors of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York for the first time signed concurrent compact legislation into law creating a regional body with the force of law to oversee a unified approach to managing a river system without regard to political boundaries....

...When the DRBC was created, some 43 state agencies, 14 interstate agencies, and 19 federal agencies exercised a multiplicity of splintered powers and duties within the watershed, which stretches 330 miles from the Delaware River's headwaters near Hancock, N. Y., to the mouth of the Delaware Bay.

The Compact's signing marked the first time since the nation's birth that the federal government and a group of states joined together as equal partners in a river basin planning, development, and regulatory agency....

There will be more urban pollution and there goes Environmental Justice. There is only one way to protect the area from pollution and violatoins of the Clean Water Act and that is to prohibit permanently any fracking along the Delaware River Water Basin.

September 11, 2017
By Phil Gregory

A New Jersey lawmaker (click here) is urging continuation of a temporary moratorium on fracking in the Delaware River watershed.

Senator Kip Bateman says the drilling process that uses high-pressure liquid to extract natural gas has benefits but allowing it in the Delaware River Basin could endanger water quality.

"There's a great deal of concern that some of the chemicals that they're using to fracture the shale or the rock to get to the gas is contaminating water supply. So until we know for sure, and I know some studies are being done, I would like them to at least continue the ban."

The Delaware River Basin Commission put the moratorium in place in 2010 until it adopts regulations on fracking....