LoHud.com

Advocates on both sides of the years-long debate over natural-gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale had assumed it would be the courts -- not the governor -- that ultimately decided fracking's fate in the Empire State. So far, they've been wrong. Jon Campbell / Albany Bureau

ALBANY – The state Department of Environmental Conservation released a 2,000-page, seven-years-in-the-making report Wednesday that lays the groundwork for the state's promised ban of large-scale hydraulic fracturing.

New York is about to take its next step toward a ban on large-scale hydraulic fracturing.

A several-thousand-page document that will lay out the rationale for prohibiting fracking is “being printed as we speak,” state Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joseph Martens said Wednesday.

A coalition of groups opposed to hydraulic fracturing in New York held a news conference in Binghamton on Monday to call on the state to withdraw a six-years-in-the-making environmental review.






From the Press & Sun-Bulletin's Steven Howe: