Pennsylvania kicked one fracking company out of the area for more than a decade. It just couldn't keep it out for good. It came back in late 2023, and by the next year, Texas-based company Coterra was running lines beneath dozens of homes in Dimock, Pa., including the one where local resident Victoria Switzer, a former schoolteacher, paints, according to Mother Jones. The noise from the construction and truck traffic have kept her up at night. "They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese," she said. "We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart."
The gas-rich rock under Dimock, called the Marcellus shale, also runs under New York towns just over the state line, such as Dryden. New York spent years deciding whether to let fracking companies drill it the way Coterra drilled Dimock, but in December 2014 it said no. The state's ban has been in place since June 2015.
Now New York is freezing the construction of big data centers, and so is Texas. On July 14, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order telling the Department of Environmental Conservation to freeze state permit applications for data centers that use 50 megawatts or more. "As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it's my responsibility to take action and lead," Hochul said. In September, the Texas Tribune reported, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott $ABT ordered his state's environmental agency to stop issuing permits to data centers until the state finishes auditing them.
New York spent years deciding on fracking, and its ban has held ever since. Hochul and Abbott moved much faster on data centers, freezing permit applications while the studies they ordered were still underway. There is no defined end date, and the moratorium could be challenged in court.
The drilling New York's fracking ban left across the border
While New York kept its shale closed, Pennsylvania drilled the same rock and produced more than twice as much gas in 2023 as it had in 2013, the year before New York announced its ban. Gas passed coal as Pennsylvania's biggest source of electricity in 2016, and by 2023 Pennsylvania was sending more electricity to other states than any other state did. New York's ban decided which side of the border the gas came out of, not whether anyone drilled for it.
Fracking brought money to Pennsylvania's side of the border. After New York's ban took effect, the economies of the seven Pennsylvania counties along the line grew larger than those of the New York counties across from them, according to a report from conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. Drilling for natural gas made all of the difference.
But the town of Dimock bore the cost. State regulators discovered that the fracking company had contaminated 19 of Dimock's private water wells, and a 2016 federal report confirmed harmful levels of lead and arsenic in the water of 27 homes, with enough methane in 17 of them to risk an explosion. When the case reached court in 2022, the company had been charged with eight felonies and ended up pleading no contest to one misdemeanor. It agreed to pay for a $16 million water line, and that same day, Pennsylvania let it drill near Dimock again. Two years later, the drilling was back and work on the water line hadn't started. Ray Kemble, Switzer's neighbor of 30 years, was moving away. "The water is still not fixed," he said.
The fracking bans that held up in New York's highest court
Towns on the New York side of the same rock banned fracking too, and the studies they did first helped their bans survive in court. Hochul's data center freeze has no finished study behind it.
The gas companies were already there when the towns acted. They had been buying leases in Dryden and Middlefield for years. Both towns studied the question before voting, and Middlefield paid for a study of its own. When the companies sued, New York's highest court upheld both bans in 2014. "The Towns both studied the issue and acted within their home rule powers in determining that gas drilling would permanently alter and adversely affect the deliberately-cultivated, small-town character of their communities," Judge Victoria Graffeo wrote for the majority.
The state did the same kind of work before its own ban. Regulators spent seven years on their review and took in 260,000 public comments, and the state's health department finished a review of its own in December 2014. "I asked myself, 'Would I let my family live in a community with fracking?' The answer is no," Dr. Howard Zucker, then New York's acting health commissioner, said.
Data center developers are waiting the same way. They've rushed to get projects in line to plug into New York's power grid, and most of those requests came in just last year. If one of them sues over Hochul's freeze, the state won't have a finished study to point to, the way Dryden and Middlefield did.
The data center freezes that rest on a governor's order
That study is coming, but only after New York stopped issuing permits. Hochul's order hands the question to the state's Department of Public Service, which has to hold public hearings and take comments before it reports back, much as regulators did before the fracking ban. The permits stay on hold until the department finishes, and it's not clear when that will happen. Hochul's office has said the pause will last up to a year.
The longer the wait, the weaker New York's position if a developer sues. Vorys, the law firm that warned in April about moratoriums like these, argued that property owners have a stronger claim to compensation when a building pause keeps getting extended or starts to work like a permanent ban. Hochul's open-ended order invites that argument.
Texas's freeze is just as open-ended, and it comes from a governor who wanted data centers less than a year ago. Last November, Abbott said he wanted Texas to be an "epicenter of AI development," but by September, he said data centers "must pay their own way, protect our grid and water, and complete" all the necessary audits. Until they do, permits are off the table.
New York studied fracking for seven years before it made its ban official. Hochul and Abbott halted data centers first and ordered the studies and audits afterward. Developers in New York and Texas who already have projects waiting are left holding plans that neither state has said yes or no to, and the families who live near those sites don't know when either state will decide.