Fracking is back in the national spotlight as a sparring point in the 2024 presidential campaign.
For residents of a rural Susquehanna County community, it’s never gone away.
Seventeen years after the former Cabot Oil & Gas started fracking there, Dimock Township residents say pollution from the process has left permanent stains on the land and their lives.
One man is prepared to give up his home over it.
Ray Kemble has donated his house to start the Dimock Environmental Research Center, so scientists can learn more about the effects of fracking.
“I’ve just lost too many friends due to this … [we’ve] been battling this for two decades,” Ray Kemble said during an August interview around his kitchen table.
Kemble recited a list of names -- mostly men in their 40s and 50s, who he believes died from fracking-related health issues.
Dimock gained international notoriety for its depiction in the 2010 documentary ‘Gasland,’ in which residents were shown setting fire to polluted water flowing from their kitchen faucets.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, uses pressurized fluid to extract gas and oil from rock formations – like the Marcellus Shale beneath Dimock -- by creating cracks in the rocks through which the valuable energy-producing substances flow.
Fracking fluid typically mixes water, sand and chemicals. Critics of the process say it creates toxic pollution that affects soil, water, plants, wildlife and humans.
Kemble hasn’t drunk water from his well since 2009. He carts water to his home every week.
Scientists will study the water from lakes near Kemble’s home and well water for pollutants, while the house itself will serve as the center’s headquarters, with lab space and rooms to host resident researchers. Kemble said he will continue to live at the home for up to two years.
The center also will install at least 30 air quality monitors around Kemble’s property. Board member and Duquesne University professor John Stoltz plans to bring his students to study Dimock and the effects of prolonged environmental pollution.
Two Portuguese scientists will be among the first researchers to stay at the center once it fully opens.
“They’re botanists … they were here once. They couldn’t believe the contamination of the trees and the grass, and said they want to come back here and do more studies,” Kemble said.
The plan was announced in August, and renovations are underway this month.
Environmental activist Craig Stevens said the organization is looking for grant writers and aid from other environmental organizations. Stevens owns property in Silver Lake Township, 15 miles away from Dimock. He said he got involved back in 2010 after he saw his neighbors suffering due to drilling.
Why Dimock?
Stevens described the vast, gas-rich Marcellus Shale rock formation that sits underneath New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.
It underlies nearly two-thirds of Pennsylvania, and Dimock was “ground zero” for drilling, Stevens and other activists say.
“They were sitting on top of one of the largest natural gas finds on this planet. There’s the Saudi Arabia of natural gas underneath this nine-square mile box,” Stevens said.
Cabot started fracking Dimock in 2008.
A 2021 merger between Cabot and Cimarex Energy led to the creation of Coterra Energy. The Houston, Texas-based company owns over 1,100 wells in Pennsylvania, primarily in Susquehanna County.
Multiple efforts to reach a Coterra spokesperson for this story were unsuccessful.
Activists’ latest battle is to try and to stop Coterra Energy from drilling new horizontal wells underneath Dimock, something that picked up speed after a 12-year moratorium on drilling ended in 2022.
Fracking in the spotlight again
Fracking, meanwhile, has become a talking point in the 2024 presidential election, with allegations that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has changed her position on it.
Harris expressed opposition to fracking when she was running her first presidential campaign. Harris, then a U.S. Senator from California, told CNN in September 2019 she would try to ban fracking on her first day as president.
Her 2024 opponent, Republican former President Donald Trump, attacked Harris’ anti-fracking stance during a July 31 rally in Harrisburg. The Harris campaign fired back with a statement contending she never planned to ban fracking as president.
“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” the Harris campaign stated.
Harris expanded on her campaign’s statements in an Aug. 29 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, where she said her “values have not changed” when asked about changes to her policy stances.
The day after Kemble and fellow activists announced plans for their new research center, Trump doubled down on fracking during his Aug. 17 rally in Wilkes-Barre Township. He criticized Harris for changing her stance a few months before the election and argued Pennsylvania would be “ruined” without fracking.
“Pennsylvania is going to always be fracking, because we desperately need the energy and we desperately need the jobs. But she will end it…in addition, your local and state government will be starved billions of dollars in oil and gas revenue, which means higher taxes, worse schools and lower quality of life,” Trump said at Mohegan Arena.
Harris’ clean energy policies will mean “death for Pennsylvania energy,” Trump added.
Harris snapped back a few weeks later during the Sept 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia. She argued she was the tie-breaker vote in passing the Inflation-Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. The act was one of the largest clean energy policies passed in American history.
“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris said. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”
Harris notably did not refer to fracking during a 24-minute campaign speech Sept. 13 at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre.
Stevens, Kemble and other activists said they feel Harris’s changing positions on fracking are further proof that neither political party will stand by Dimock.
‘Dimock is not yesterday’s news’
Campaign statements notwithstanding, environmental activists fear the media, politicians and the nation have largely forgotten about Dimock.
Victoria Switzer, self-proclaimed ‘accidental activist,’ said neither political party protected residents. At the Dimock Environmental Research Center opening, she said near vice-presidential candidate Josh Shapiro failed in 2022.
As Pennsylvania Attorney General, Democrat Josh Shapiro – now governor -- charged Cabot in 2020 for polluting Dimock’s water supply.
Switzer said she thought that was good enough. The charges couldn’t restore Dimock’s water supply, but she felt Cabot was held accountable. But Shapiro came back in 2022 with a new idea.
“The AG came into Dimock, flashing their guns and their badges, the investigative officers, and [gave] us the promise that we were going to see justice,” said Switzer.
Shapiro negotiated a November 2022 plea deal with Coterra Energy in which the company pleaded no contest to polluting, the legal equivalent of a guilty plea. Coterra also agreed to pay Pennsylvania-American Water Company $16.3 million to run underground pipes to residents with polluted water. Residents could see a waterline by 2027, according to the deal.
But instead of seeing construction companies bring in water pipes into Dimock, Switzer and her neighbors say they have seen over a dozen new fracking lines in Dimock.
Alongside the plea deal, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) “quietly” lifted a 12-year-long moratorium on new fracking in Dimock. Existing operations were not affected by the moratorium. That decision came out the same day as the plea deal, on Nov. 29, 2022, according to the Associated Press. It allows Coterra to drill horizontally underneath the previously protected nine-square mile area of Dimock.
One of the new lines runs directly under Switzer’s home.
“Dimock is not yesterday’s news. It’s still happening,” Switzer said.
Stevens said "Big Oil and Gas" squeezed Dimock dry.
“The industry came into this beautiful area, demolished the water, ruined the land, poisoned most of the animals and then made it so nobody can move away unless you’re wealthy enough to just abandon a property that you live in,” Stevens said.
Kemble agreed with Stevens. He said he’s only stayed in Dimock for as long as he has because he cannot afford to leave.
But the oil and gas industry isn’t solely to blame, Stevens added.
“Look in the mirror, that’s the problem. We’re not acting enough. We’re not holding people accountable enough. We’re not making this a mission to win,” Stevens said.
