New York's attorney general has taken the first step in turning back Exxon Mobil's plan to use "fracking" on up to 18,000 gas wells in New York City's watershed – an application of the highly controversial extraction process that would affect 9 million water-drinkers in New York and cost the state billions in beefed up water-filtering measures. For those of you who've been living under a rock, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an extraction process that involves injecting fluid – water, sand and a mixture of toxic chemicals – under extremely high pressure into rock formations to break them apart and release the oil and natural gas contained in them. Growing numbers of landowners, environmental groups, public officials and concerned citizens say fracking contaminates drinking-water supplies – and scientific studies back those claims. Concerns have reached fever pitch with France last month banning the fracking process nationwide. According to a May 31 Bloomberg News article, New York AG Eric Schneiderman filed a complaint yesterday in federal court in Brooklyn to stop regulations that would allow hydraulic fracturing in thousands of gas wells in the Marcellus Shale region of the Delaware River Basin. The basin covers nearly 60 percent of the land comprising ...
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