CITIZEN POWER ALLIANCE

ROARING BRANCH, Pa. - The frack job was frozen.

Deep beneath an icy Tioga County farm last week, an effort to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale shuddered to a halt. The culprit was not the 14-degree weather, but an innocuous material more often associated with beaches: sand.

The procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is designed to liberate gas locked in the shale by injecting pressurized fluid into a well to shatter the rock. But this frack job in north-central Pennsylvania was stalled: Sand contained in the frack fluid had clogged up the bore.

"These things happen," said Greg Carder, a contractor employed by East Resources Inc., of Warren, to frack the well.

Another contractor was summoned to dislodge the blockage. The one-day delay idled about 100 workers and the fleet of assembled machinery, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the well's $4 million price.

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