— It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the lure of the Marcellus Shale has set off a “Pennsylvania Gas Rush,” analogous to the California Gold Rush, the Texas oil boom and the discovery of oil on Alaska’s North Slope.

The Marcellus Shale is one of the largest unconventional on-shore gas deposits in the world, and the gas industry has flocked to our state in great numbers – and things are just getting started.

With somewhere between 250 trillion and 500 trillion cubic feet of gas deep beneath our feet, the Marcellus Shale represents a natural gas supply that could meet America’s energy needs for the next 50 to 80 years.

The promise of this new industry comes at a critical time in our history, when bridge fuels to the future are desperately needed to help reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil. 

At the same time, the recession has created a state budget in need of new sources of revenue, and new job creation is precisely what so many of Pennsylvania’s cities and town need, as our state’s unemployment rate remains at more than 9 percent.

But you need not look very far around this state to see that we’ve been down this road before.

Throughout its history, Pennsylvania has paid a very heavy price for the development of timber, coal and other extracted resources.

That price has even yet to be fully paid and is evidenced by more than 5,000 miles of polluted waterways, thousands of abandoned mines and oil and gas wells, decaying infrastructure, and economic devastation caused by poor planning and a shortsighted thirst for growth decades ago.

We need to learn from the mistakes of the past, apply them to the development of the Marcellus Shale, and make sure that we do everything possible to create a sustainable, thriving, and successful Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale economy that does not leave an environmental burden to future generations.

Just recently, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council released a report that outlines a series of steps that should be taken to ensure that we can realize the benefits of this once-in-a-generation resource while, at the same time, protect the environment, public health and safeguard against the kind of widespread devastation that were the legacies of the coal and timber industries.

The report is designed to ensure that we move quickly yet deliberately to get this right as this industry is developing and not leave future generations to shoulder the burden of environmental damage we leave behind.

We need more-effective regulations that meet the challenges of “hydraulic fracturing” and modern drilling techniques. The current regulations governing oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania were written before the adoption of new technologies and methods. It’s time to make the law relevant to the modern industry.

The Department of Environmental Protection will have to struggle to keep up with the dramatic expansion of this industry here. Thus far, the department is doing a good job in managing Marcellus regulations, as evidenced by its tough stance on the accident at a Clearfield County gas well in June. 

But hamstrung by successive years of state budget cuts, DEP needs more resources to keep up with the requirements of sound regulatory oversight. So as the General Assembly contemplates a severance tax on wellhead production, we would urge that such tax revenues be used to fund regulatory oversight and enforcement, to restore funding to environmental efforts like the successful Growing Greener program, as well as to assist those communities most directly impacted by the development of this resource.

There’s no reason why development of the Marcellus Shale should produce winners and losers. If we do this right, everyone can win – the industry, the people of Pennsylvania, and the environment. 

If we all work together, Pennsylvania can be a model to the nation in sustainable energy development, and preserve the historic landscape of Penn’s Woods for future generations.



Don Welsh is president and chief executive officer of  Pennsylvania Environmental Council. The council’s report, “Developing the Marcellus Shale,” can be found online at www.pecpa.org.