You Think The Government Is Going to Ban Fracking?

In Pennsylvania, Marcellus:

When Resick paid taxes on the lease-signing bonus in 2007 for gas drilling on her 300-acre farm, she was an early player in what has become a tax boon for the state. Lease and royalty income taxes totaled $17 million in 2007; that swelled to more than $100 million from 2010 earnings so far.

The state has maybe half of the collections still to count for 2010, according to figures from the state Department of Revenue.

Since the shale gas rush started in Pennsylvania in 2005, drillers have bored more than 3,700 wells into the gas-rich Marcellus rock layer, a mile or deeper underground, according to the Department of Environmental Protection. They have sought nearly 8,600 well permits through Aug. 12, the most recent statistics available. 

There's no way the government can afford to ban fracking -- that doesn't mean it won't -- but the government, neither the federal government nor the state governments, can afford to shut down fracking. The state budgets would be destroyed as well as hundreds of thousands, if not thousands of thousands of jobs related to the oil industry would be lost.


Today's astounding news that the president shut down the EPA's plan to further constrain the coal industry and the electric utilities spoke volumes.