The gas industry doesn't seem to have taken much of an interest in the talk surrounding a ban on fracking in the Delaware River basin. It could be that its key players don't think there's developable gas resources down there.

In fact, all the protest we've seen on the issue has come from environmentalists, who say it's not enough to ban hydraulic fracking — the process of pumping water, mixed with chemicals, into the earth to release natural gas. They also want the ban to include the import, treatment and discharge of wastewater from the drilling.

You never know what the future holds, however, so we're on board with New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy's call for a 'full' fracking ban that does just that in the basin, which touches parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and New York. All of Bucks and Montgomery counties and the northern half of Burlington County are in the basin.

Murphy announced his position in a letter to the Delaware River Basin Commission, which oversees water resources throughout the watershed. The commission includes the governors of the four states plus a representative of the federal government.

A spokesman for Gov. Tom Wolf told NPR that his office was still reviewing the letter. We hope that once that review is finished Wolf will follow Murphy's lead.

The commission created a de facto moratorium on fracking in 2010 and extended it indefinitely the following November when it delayed enacting regulations that would have allowed drilling.

In 2017, Wolf voted with the governors of New York and Delaware to issue draft regulations to permanently ban fracking in the basin. Murphy's predecessor, Chris Christie, abstained from the vote and the federal representative opposed it. That proposed ban, however, did not include the wastewater restriction that environmentalists wanted. Murphy's letter supporting a "full" ban was praised by those environmentalists.

We're not sure when, or if, a vote on Murphy's proposal will follow, but here's why we like it and hope that Gov. Wolf will support it. We believe that if the gas industry is interested in the basin, it'd more likely be for wastewater discharge than for drilling. The basin's proximity to Pennsylvania's portion of the Marcellus Shale could make it a logical place for the wastewater, which environmentalists claim is toxic, to end up. And as Murphy said in his letter:

"The chemicals present in fracking wastewater are still unknown and we must take caution to protect the recreational, ecological and water resources for the millions of residents and businesses who rely on a clean Delaware River basin."