Check Out StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Updated Drilling App

StateIm­pact Pennsylvania’s Mar­cel­lus Shale drilling app has got­ten a lot more crowded. (Click on the above image to view it.)
The inter­ac­tive map, which tracks the state’s pro­duc­ing Mar­cel­lus Shale wells, is based on the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Protection’s most recent pro­duc­tion report. When we first launched the page in Decem­ber, it visu­al­ized the 1,608 wells that pro­duced nat­ural gas between Jan­u­ary and June 2011.
Now that DEP has released infor­ma­tion for July-December, 2,200 wells appear on the page. North­east Penn­syl­va­nia appears much more crowded, as Brad­ford County over­took Wash­ing­ton as the commonwealth’s top drilling hot spot dur­ing the last six months of 2011. The county’s pro­duc­ing well totals increased by 52 per­cent, to 366, while extracted gas jumped up by more than 34 per­cent. ((For more infor­ma­tion on how Pennsylvania’s drilling land­scape changed between June and Decem­ber 2011, click here.)

Some back­ground on the app: just click on a well, and you’ll learn who owns it, and whether Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion inspec­tors have cited it for vio­la­tions. Problem-free wells are green on the map. If inspec­tors have cited a site for vio­la­tions, it’s plot­ted as an orange dot — and the cita­tion details are listed on the page.
The app tracks pro­duc­ing wells, not spud­ded wells. That means it only includes wells cur­rently churn­ing out nat­ural gas.
Every sin­gle well has its own page, so you can link to them or share them via Twit­ter and Face­book. If you think there’s more we need to know about the drilling site, there’s a space for you to share com­ments, sto­ries or pictures.
The app helps answer broader ques­tions, too. Try­ing to fig­ure out who the biggest play­ers are, or what areas are drilling hot spots? You can nav­i­gate to wells by county, munic­i­pal­ity or oper­a­tor to learn that information.