Mike Sauers
August 13, 2024
Oil and gas continues to drive the bus in Pennsylvania. They know full well that “hydraulic fracking” is an energy intensive, abusive and dirty endeavor. To get off the ground it requires special treatment from local and state regulations including no “severance tax”. It requires enormous quantities of fresh water which immediately becomes “produced water” meaning that it is polluted. How so, you may ask? The industry is allowed to add secret, proprietary chemical soups to the water to assist the process. This polluted water, which often has a radioactive component, is sometimes reused, sometimes spread on roads for dust control or winter treatment, or sometimes pumped into deep wells. All of these options are stupid and laughable. The fracked gas must then be transported via tankers or pipelines. Pipelines require “eminent domain”. The state takes your land, runs pipelines roughshod through parks, forests, under rivers and streams. Everywhere! Tanker trucks carrying water or gas clog rural roads, disrupt traffic and create community tensions. All fracking wells release methane, a major contributor to global warming. There are thousands of leaking wells in Pennsylvania. There is more but the point is made.
Now, oil and gas knows that there industry is on oxygen and in the intensive care unit. They are desperate. More fracking equals more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We put 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Their answer is to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pump it into “pore spaces” under the ground. Governor Shapiro and the state legislature are going along with this preposterous idea. Shapiro signed the law declaring an untested and baseless technology to be in the public interest. This defies logic. SB 831 strips Pennsylvania landowners of their subsurface rights, shifts liability to the state, and exposes everyone to a new and very dangerous generation of fossil fuel infrastructure. Read/research SB 831 for yourself. I will point out that the bill ushered in a program for speeding up the DEP’s permitting process, including fossil fuel projects. This limits citizen participation. There was also a doubling of a subsidy for the combustion of waste coal, which passed as part of the annual tax code and the creation of a tax credit for operators of depleted oil and gas wells.
The governor and state legislators are not listening to everyday Pennsylvanians. They are very cozy with oil and gas. They thrive on corporate welfare. Follow the money.