Two Rivers, No Justice!

We, the undersigned, call on the Delaware River Basin Commission, the United States Congress, and the Trump Administration to immediately repeal the DRBC's unlawful and inequitable ban on hydraulic fracturing in the Delaware River Basin.

The Delaware River Basin Commission's permanent ban on high-volume hydraulic fracturing is a textbook act of injustice — and it falls squarely on the shoulders of landowners in Wayne and other counties who have been denied equal justice under law for over a decade. 

The DRBC, governed by the same majority of member states as the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, allows natural gas development on one side of a mountain ridge while categorically prohibiting it in the other — despite the SRBC's own water quality monitoring showing "no discernible impact on the quality of water resources.” 

The Marcellus Shale is consistently praised for clean energy and economic development, but the DRBC tells families on our side of the ridge they are the exception — that their land, their mineral rights, and their livelihoods simply do not count.

This ban is not grounded in science — it is grounded in political ideology, and it is being used to pick economic winners and losers in Pennsylvania. 

The DRBC's claim that it holds unique water quality authority beyond that of the SRBC is a ruse: both basins are already governed by rigorous Clean Water Act and Pennsylvania Clean Streams Law standards that the natural gas industry consistently meets, yet no other industry or land use in the basin faces anything close to a blanket prohibition. 

Worse, the DRBC proposes to abscond with the full value of some landowners' holdings by banning natural gas development — meaning those who own only mineral rights lose 100% of what they legally possess, and those who own both surface and mineral rights are left with only residual land value, forced to spend their estates on takings litigation just to reclaim what was lawfully theirs. 

That is not regulation. That is theft.

We therefore petition the DRBC Commissioners to rescind the 2021 high-volume hydraulic fracturing prohibition and restore equal justice to every Pennsylvania landowner in the Delaware River Basin. 

We also call on the Pennsylvania General Assembly to reassert its authority over an unelected, unaccountable Commission that has usurped the legislature's role and stripped citizens of rights the Commonwealth has never voted to take away. 

And, we call on the Trump Administration to direct the federal representative on the DRBC — the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — to vote to repeal this rule and end, once and for all, the unconscionable two-river double standard that has denied equal justice to our communities.