Fracking flourishes amid data center surge in Western Pa.

By TAWNYA PANIZZI AND NADIA COMMODORE TribLive

Data center development across Western Pennsylvania has spurred renewed growth in another hotly debated industry.

Fracking, the extraction of oil and natural gas from underground rock, jumped 50% from 2024 to 2025, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. There were 428 new wells last year, up from about 285 in 2024.

Abundant amounts of natural gas are needed to power data centers and similar energy-intensive sites like telecommunication hubs and cold storage warehouses.

Data from the DEP shows 2025 was the busiest season for digging new wells since 2022, when there were 574 unconventional wells started.

Washington and Greene counties are among the most heavily drilled in the state, with 2,166 wells and 1,621 wells, respectively.

In Westmoreland, there have been about 420 wells recorded since 2007, spread across Hempfield, Murrysville, Upper Burrell, Penn Township and other areas.

Allegheny County has about 220 active fracking sites in rural areas like Fawn, Frazer, Indiana Township, Plum and West Deer.

The projects have spawned tension between environmentally concerned residents and some municipal officials who welcome drilling because of the financial boon.

Since well drilling began in earnest in Upper Burrell, for instance, the township has received “well over $1 million” from activity at five well pads, said Ross Walker III, chairman of the township’s board of supervisors. That’s almost as much as this year’s entire township budget of $1.3 million.

But that doesn’t satisfy activists, like Gillian Graber, who fear air pollution, groundwater contamination, possibly induced earthquakes and water scarcity.

Graber, executive director and co-founder of grassroots environmental group Protect PT, said fracking requires millions of gallons of fresh water per well. Her group, founded in 2014, monitors industrial developments and works to hold officials accountable to protect natural resources. Protect PT provides education and resources to help empower residents as government watchdogs.

“I don’t think we should have to adapt to make concessions for an industry that makes billions of dollars while our health is impacted and our quality of life,” Graber said.

What is fracking?

Fracking is a technique used to draw oil and natural gas from underground rock through the injection of high-pressure water, sand and chemicals.

Wells in Pennsylvania are concentrated mostly in the western and north-central regions to tap into the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.

Marcellus shale, found throughout the Allegheny Plateau, runs across Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, western Maryland and most of West Virginia. It consists mostly of black shale and limestone beds, with concentrations of pyrite. It splits easily.

The Utica shale, stretching from Ohio through Pennsylvania and New York into Canada, is one of the country’s largest reserves of natural gas and oil.

It runs even deeper than the better-known Marcellus. The Utica is often as deep as 14,000 feet below the surface, which is about 4,000 to 6,000 feet deeper than the Marcellus, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Over the past two decades, fracking revolutionized the country’s energy market by unleashing previously inaccessible reserves of oil and gas. The industry has pumped money into local municipalities like Allegheny Township, according to supervisor Chairman Jamie Morabito.

He said CNX, which has drilling operations in Washington and Bell townships and seeks to expand operations in the area, in June gifted the township $25,000 to be used toward the purchase of a police vehicle. Morabito called it a good-faith gesture.

Environmental concerns, however, have spurred prolonged and expensive arguments over where and how many wells should be permitted by local governments.

State legislators are mulling several bills that would increase buffer zones between well pads and homes, schools and hospitals, as fracking is expected to ramp up to fuel a recent demand for data centers, the facilities that house networked computers, servers and storage for digital applications.

The Environmental Integrity Project, Clean Air Council and others are rallying for fracking setbacks to widen by more than 2,500 feet, from 500 to 3,281 feet, from any building or drinking water well to protect what they call endangered public health. They want even greater setbacks of 5,280 feet, or one mile, from schools and hospitals.

“The majority of the data- center buildout will be powered by fracked gas,” Matt Kelso, manager of data and technology at nonprofit Frac-Tracker Alliance, told Inside Climate News in August.

According to Data Center Proposal Tracker, there are 86 proposed, preliminary or expanding data center sites in Pennsylvania.

“It will require not just the wells but pipelines, trucking, water usage, injection wells,” Kelso said. “This will allow the industry to pump the gas from where it is, safely locked in the ground, to the data centers or to the power plants that provide their electricity.”

Ravi Madhavan, professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh, said it doesn’t have to be a “goodversus-bad story.” “It’s a problem of concentrated benefits and socialized costs,” Madhavan said. “If the data center is allowed, the benefits are immediate for shareholders and employees.

“But the concern is that, in order to accommodate it, there are costs passed down to the public. That is where the challenge comes in, to make sure there is transparency over everything.”

Local concerns

In West Deer, residents rallied but lost a battle this year against EQT to install a dehydrator and compressor at the Leto well pad off Oak Road. The permit was approved by Allegheny County in May, with operations beginning July 1.

Vicki Austin, a member of the Concerned Residents of West Deer (CROWD), said she feels sick about the new equipment that she claims comes with a disturbing level of noise and air pollution.

“We’ve been told that the compressor station will have 24/7 noise, so not looking forward to that,” she said. “The dehydrator unit had to go through clearance with the Allegheny County Health Department air quality division because it would emit tons of pollutants into the local air every year, so not happy about that, either.”

Tri-ethylene glycol dehydrators are used in the oil and gas industry to remove water from gas.

The fight was the most recent since CROWD was founded in 2020 to fight a then-plan by Olympus Energy to build the Dionysus well in West Deer.

Supervisors unanimously denied that project in December 2021.

EQT did not respond to Trib-Live’s requests for comments about the dehydrator.

But a legal ad published before the company’s request said the equipment could create more than 70 tons of chemical emissions annually. The emissions are projected to include nearly 40 tons of volatile organic compounds, more than 18 tons of carbon monoxide, around 8 tons of nitrogen oxides, almost 4 tons of hazardous air pollutants and just over 1 ton of particulate matter.

Ronnie Das, Allegheny County Health Department spokesperson, said community feedback and involvement in the project remain critical.

“We want residents to report concerns, ask questions and be part of the solution,” Das said.

In Westmoreland County, more than 6,100 fracking wells have been drilled since 2007.

“When we started organizing, we were really going off of information that other people, particularly from Washington County, were telling us about the impact,” said Graber, whose Protect PT group started as a grassroots effort in 2014. “But then we very, very quickly — as soon as we saw the first well pad in our community — saw what was exactly going to happen.

“There’s grinding noise that keeps people up at night. Truck traffic is a huge problem — damage to roadways, spills and contamination from a truck overturning. We have that happening in our community.”

Brian Aiello, CNX vice president of external affairs, told TribLive that he believes the company’s relationship with the communities where it operates “is extremely collaborative in nature.”

“We quickly respond to any concerns and design our operations to align specifically with the individual needs of each community,” he said. “In our experience, meritless appeals from environmental front groups do not represent the views of most residents and generally are not determinative of our priorities or schedule.

“We aim to leave a lasting positive impact and ensure the communities where we operate are better off because we were there.”

There are 74 wells in Penn Township, with additional sites proposed. Those are spread across nine pads.

State regulatory bodies evaluate and permit wells on a case-by-case basis rather than enforcing a hard cap per pad, according to Protect PT. Most modern unconventional pads hold between five and 20 wells.

Highly contested in Penn Township is the Drakulic well pad along First Street, near the Trafford border and within a mile of about 3,000 residents.

It sits near Graber’s home. She said Protect PT has battled 11 years to shut down the CNX-proposed development, filing several lawsuits and appeals before finally scoring a temporary victory — the CNX drill and operation permits for the site expired recently.

Protect PT communications manager Noah Bedard said the permits cannot be renewed and CNX was ordered to remediate the land. CNX would have to start the application process again if it hopes to frack there.

Aiello, the CNX official, did not specifically address the reapplication but said, “We regularly optimize our operational schedule based on numerous internal and external factors.

“We continuously assess all our assets, including those in Penn Township, for future development opportunities,” he said in an email.

Bedard said the victory, no matter how short-lived, feels joyful.

“It is definitely good to hear that our hours of work to protect people’s health have paid off, but we will continue to monitor the situation,” he said.

Municipal windfall

Allegheny Township has reaped financial benefits from drilling activity, including $100,000 from the Porter well pad, originally owned by Olympus Energy. EQT acquired the site on Willowbrook Road last year.

Aiello said in June that the company looks forward to deepening its partnership with the township in years to come.

“Our experience has been that communities are supportive and welcome the transformational economic impact of natural gas development including impact fees, royalties to private landowners and governments, local capital spending in the hundreds of millions to develop new pads, wells, and related infrastructure, as well as our philanthropic investments and customized operational practices,” he said, in an email.

“(Westmoreland County) is key to our future plans.”

If Olympus and EQT are any measure, Morabito welcomes the new business.

“They’ve bonded any road that they’ve traveled on,and some, like Watson Road, they took it from a tar-and-chip road to completely repaved,” Morabito said. “That benefited the township and all the residents. They’re very good with keeping their word.

“I feel it’s been beneficial to everyone involved.”

Walker, the supervisors chairman in Upper Burrell, said the five well pads in his township have provided a financial “windfall.”

“Gas companies have been extremely generous with the township as far as money and roads and donations, buying fire vehicles and police equipment,” he said. There are no proposals to add more wells, Walker said, as focus has shifted to investment in the TECFusions Keystone Connect, which will draw power from wells already on the property.

TECfusions is a massive data center campus built on the former Alcoa and Arconic research property. The first building went live in June. It is expected to reach up to 3 gigawatts of power capacity when the full build-out is complete in 2031.

In September, the Upper Burrell supervisors instituted regulations on injection wells, where spent fracking liquid is disposed of underground, and that mandate transparency and environmental risk assessments.

If adverse effects are expected, the township has the right to refuse the project, Walker said.

“It’s a preventative maintenance so that no one will come in and use Upper Burrell as a dumping ground,” Walker said.

Benefits versus costs

Madhavan, the Pitt professor, said the issue rises far above local government. It’s a complicated business that requires state and regional input as well as guidance from regulating agencies.

Pennsylvania, he said, has taken an active role in implementing policies that ensure transparency and safety. They include requiring companies to disclose chemicals used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing earlier in the process.

In addition to a demand for data centers, the export of natural gas and the retirement of coal-fired plants have played a role in the increase in fracking regionally.

“Data centers are the big one. The idea of bringing your own power rather than drawing from the grid has become a big factor,” Madhavan said. “(Natura) gas is the first fuel of choice.”

Tawnya Panizzi and Nadia Commodore are TribLive staff writers. You can reach Tawnya at tpanizzi@triblive.com and Nadia at ncommodore@triblive. com.