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Friday, September 13, 2013

Fracking boom in Pennsylvania goes bust

"It's been a little more than two years since a then-new Gov. [Tom] Corbett famously pledged to make Pennsylvania 'the Texas of the natural-gas boom,' but already it's beginning to look as if the (Republican) governor was all hat and no cattle, at least on this issue," Will Bunch reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Unconventional drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation has dropped by more than 50 percent since its peak in 2010, the year Corbett was elected. "Experts say that's because of several factors, but the biggest by far is a steep plunge in the price that natural gas was getting on the open market, in part a result of so much fracking here and elsewhere." 

Drillers are leaving Pennsylvania for the prospect of richer finds in places such as Ohio and North Dakota, a stark contrast to five years ago, when "large oil and gas companies were flooding the zone with rigs in upstate and western Pennsylvania, at a time when natural gas was fetching $13 per million British thermal units, and the U.S. was a major importer of liquefied natural gas," Bunch writes. "But the rise of fracking technology -- breaking apart shale and capturing trapped gases that once were inaccessible -- brought so much natural gas onto the domestic market that the price collapsed as low as $2 per million Btu before rebounding to the current $3.30. . . .Today, the Baker Hughes survey shows just 50 fracking wells operating in Pennsylvania."

The natural gas bust in Pennsylvania has had a major impact on residents who allowed fracking on their land, Bunch writes. One resident in Bradford County, near the New York border, said she received $300 to $400 per month from Chesapeake Energy Corp., which was drilling on her land, but in March she didn't receive a check. She told Bunch, "They didn't have a buyer [for the gas] that month. We're paying for their bad management." (Read more)

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