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Assessingopportunities And Barriers To Reducing The Environmental Footprint Of Natural Gasdevelopment In Utah’S Uintah Basin, B. Gentry, Douglas B. Jackson-Smith, L. Belton, G. Theodori

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Development of natural gas resources in the United States has increased dramatically over the past two decades, a boom driven by favorable prices, new technological developments, and growing interest in domestic sources of energy with a smaller carbon footprint than coal or oil. Most of the expansion in U.S. natural gas production has been from so-called ‘unconventional’ reserves in which extensive natural gas resources trapped in continuous sandstone and shale formations can now be extracted using modern directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies. The Uintah Basin in northeastern Utah has been one of several areas in the U.S. where major …