Oil and gas companies have developed a way to drill for natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Natural gas is a flammable gas mixture composed of methane and several other hydrocarbons naturally occurring underground. Natural gas is used as fuel for heating, cooking and even in some automobiles like “RideOn” buses. This technique has only recently become economically feasible, given rising fossil fuel prices, and there is great potential for recovering natural gas through hydraulic fracturing. However, hydraulic fracturing generates a lot of waste and unusual side effects caused by the unnatural forces and materials used. Hydraulic fracturing has a detrimental effect on the environment due to pollution and earthquakes. Hydraulic fracturing is the process of extracting natural gas from layers of shale buried deep in the earth. One of the largest natural gas reserves in the world is found in the Marcellus Shale in the Appalachian Basin and spans New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Eastern Ohio and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. “Zones” are areas where companies are actively searching for natural gas inside shale rock formations. The areas are drilled for natural gas by hydraulic fracturing in a two-step process. First, a production well is drilled into the ground for thousands of feet, then gradually leveled so that the tip of the drill moves horizontally through the ground. The second part of the process is where it gets its name "hydraulic fracturing", because the second stage of the process is where a mixture of sand, water and chemicals, many of which are known to be harmful, is forced under extremely high pressure. down into the shale across the horizontal portion of...... middle of paper ......289. Retrieved from the Gale Science in Context database. (A264004904)Natural Gas Drilling in the Marcellus and Utica Shales: Basic Principles of Environmental Regulation [Fact Sheet]. (nd). Retrieved from Agriculture and Natural Resources, Ohio State University website: http://wayne.osu.edu/topics/agriculture-and-natural-resources/gas-and-oil-lease-information/2011-wayne- county-oils -and-gas-lease-meeting-resources/Marcellus_Shale_Fact_Sheet.pdfFracking: The new global water crisis. (2012, March). Retrieved from http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/FrackingCrisisUS.pdf Healy, JH, Rubey, WW, Griggs, DT and Raleigh, CB (1968, September). The Denver Earthquakes. Science, 161(3848), 1301-1310. Extracted from the JSTOR database. The myth that gas is 'clean energy' [Factsheet]. (nd). Retrieved from http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/myth.html