From the PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE Editorial:
Pennsylvania already has a love-hate relationship with Marcellus Shale gas drilling. Enthusiasm for the prospect of good jobs and generous payments to property owners who lease their land has been tempered by worries about the prospects for harm to the state’s air, water, roads and quality of life.
To handle that duality, the state needed the right combination of taxation and limitation. Regulations passed last week by the Legislature — dealing with well fees, zoning restrictions and environmental impact — fail on both counts.
First is the question of taxation, which Mr. Corbett rejected outright. So instead the state will have a fee system, which will require drillers to pay between $190,000 and $355,000 per well during the first 15 years it is active. The governor chose to go this route rather than enact an extraction tax, even though all other drilling states have done so and the industry has not objected to the practice. That was a political calculation, not a decision made in the best interests of the state…
Click here to read the full article.
On a trip to Potter County and getting tied up in traffic due to “improvements” being made for injection wells for hydraulic fracturing for gas, I asked a road crewman for directions to a local landmark.
The reply: “Son, I’m from Alabama, we aren’t from around here.” So much for jobs for Pennsylvanians.