Oil and gas drilling activity in West Virginia continues to expand.

For more than a decade, SkyTruth has been tracking the footprint of oil and gas development in the Marcellus and Utica shale basins in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio through our FrackFinder project. Initially, our FrackFinder project relied on volunteers to help us identify activity on the ground (thank you to all you SkyTruthers out there!). Since then, we’ve continued to update this database with help from SkyTruth interns and staff. Today, we’re excited to announce our latest updates to our West Virginia FrackFinder datasets. The updated data now include drilling sites and impoundments that appeared on the landscape through 2015–2016 (our 2016 update) and through 2017–2018 (our 2018 update). In 2016, 49 new drilling sites and 17 new impoundments appeared on the landscape. In 2018, 60 additional drilling sites and 20 new impoundments appeared; an 18% and 15% jump, respectively, from 2016.

With these additions, our West Virginia datasets track the footprint of oil and gas development in the state for more than decade, stretching from 2007 to 2018.

We use high-resolution aerial photography collected as a part of the USDA’s National Agricultural Imaging Program (NAIP) to identify drilling sites and impoundments and make their locations available to the public. NAIP imagery is typically collected every two to three years, so once the imagery from each flight season is available, we  compare permit information from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection with NAIP imagery to find and map new drilling sites. Our datasets of what’s actually on the ground — not just what’s been permitted on paper — help landowners, public health researchers, nonprofits, and policymakers identify opportunities for better policies and commonsense regulations. And our data has resulted in real-world impacts. For example, researchers from Johns Hopkins University used our FrackFinder data in Pennsylvania to document the human health impacts of fracking. Their research found that living near an unconventional natural gas drilling site can lead to higher premature birth rates in expecting mothers and may also lead to a greater chance of suffering an asthma attack. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan cited this information in his decision to ban fracking in his state.

We’ve shared the updated FrackFinder West Virginia data with research partners at Downstream Strategies and the University of California–Berkeley investigating the public health impacts of modern drilling and fracking, and with environmental advocacy groups like Appalachian Voices and FracTracker Alliance fighting the expansion of energy development in the mid-Atlantic.

We are also proud to roll out a Google Earth Engine app, which will be the new home for our  West Virginia FrackFinder data. Users can find all of our previous years’ data (2007–2014) as well as our new 2016 and 2018 datasets on this app. The interactive map allows you to zoom into locations and see exactly where we’ve found oil and gas drilling sites and wastewater impoundments. A simple click on one of the points will display the year in which we first detected drilling, along with the measured area of the site or impoundment (in square meters). Users can toggle different years of interest on and off using the left panel of the map. At the bottom of that same panel, uses can access the total number of drilling sites and impoundments identified during each year. Lastly, users can download SkyTruth’s entire FrackFinder dataset using the export button.

We hope that the updates to our West Virginia FrackFinder datasets, and the new Earth Engine app that hosts them, will inform researchers, landowners, policymakers, and others, and help them bring about positive change. Feel free to take a look and send us feedback; we love to hear from people using our data.