Pigging Out? A Tax Would Not Hamper Marcellus Shale Drillers
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
1 September 2010
Last Friday the head of Pitt's Center for Healthy Environments and
Communities said the emissions of hazardous chemicals into the air and
water from wastewater ponds at Marcellus Shale gas wells were a cause
for public concern.
Conrad Dan Volz told a seminar at the university's Graduate School of
Public Health that, with thousands of wells and pumping stations soon
to be in operation due to the natural gas boom in Pennsylvania,
research is needed to gauge the health effects of contaminants like
benzene, toluene and xylene that are being released in greater numbers
from fluids that fracture the underground shale.
On the same day, the state Department of Environmental Protection said
that 41 of the 74 companies drilling in the shale formations in the
state missed the deadline for reporting the production levels of their
wells. DEP plans to follow up and get the information required by law;
the agency also may pursue enforcement actions.
These are only the latest two reasons why the Legislature should not
drag its feet in passing a tax on Marcellus Shale drilling. The revenue
is needed to provide adequate oversight of this growing activity and to
help mitigate damage that may come to local communities or the
environment.
A tax, like the extraction taxes in other states, would also drive home
the message that Pennsylvania wants a responsive and responsible
drilling industry. Some of those in the industry and their allies in
the Legislature argue that this "new" enterprise should not be
strangled in the cradle with a state tax, before it can realize its
potential as a jobs creator and an engine of economic activity.
While the shale drilling is new to Pennsylvania, it is not new in other
states, where many of the same companies have been extracting gas and
paying taxes on it for years.
One of those is Fort Worth, Texas-based Range Resources, which opened a
division at Southpointe to oversee its work here. Like other corporate
citizens, Range has gotten involved in the community, spending $100,000
this year at the Washington County fair's livestock auction. The
company spent $36,000 alone on a prize pig, which fair officials said
set a state record. The drilling firm then donated the animals back to
the fair so they could be auctioned a second time to raise money for
scholarships.
Range Resources is sponsoring a $100,000 scholarship program for youths
in the Pennsylvania Future Farmers of America to give $1,000 awards to
100 Pennsylvania students next year. While such benefits (cynics would
call them payoffs) highlight what the industry can do for communities,
they also demonstrate that the companies can afford to pay the same
kind of tax they are used to paying in other states.
A $36,000 pig -- or tax revenue to pay regulators to monitor drillers
whose pollutants, in the words of Dr. Volz, deserve close inspection?
We know what most Pennsylvanians would choose.