Marcellus shale and related economic development could bring thousands of jobs to Pa. in the near future, industry leaders said Thursday.
“The U.S. is the world’s number one producer of natural gas. The International Energy Agency believes that the United States could be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia in 2020- just seven years from now,” said Stephanie Wissman, the Executive Director at the Associated Petroleum Industries of Pa.
Wissman spoke along with Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association President Lou D’Amico.
“According to a December, 2012 IHS Global report, the state’s unconventional gas-related employment is expected to more than double to nearly 221,000 by 2020 and grow to 387,000 by 2035,” Wissman said.
But some caution that past job creation estimates have fallen short. Myron Arnowitt is the Pennsylvania State Director of Clean Water Action, an environmental group that has called for a moratorium on gas drilling.
“Obviously the industry doesn’t have a phenomenal past record in terms of projected jobs that were to be created. State bureau studies have shown it is more likely that 5,000-7,000 jobs would be created, nothing like what is being talked about the industry,” Arnowitt said.
Keystone Energy Forum is an education group formed by API and PIOGA. It announced that Gov. Tom Corbett will attend it’s next “Pennsylvania Natural Gas Summit” on Friday June 14. The summit is set to take place at the Franklin Institute.
Estimates vary over the number of jobs created so far as a result of Marcellus shale gas development. The Pa. Department of Labor and Industry puts the number around
245,000 while a Penn State economist recently pegged the figure closer to 100,000, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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3 Responses
Hi Mark, sorry for the mix up. We mistakenly used your photo instead of one for which we have permission. Your photo has been removed from the site. Thanks for calling our attention to this.
Dear Nick,
This is Mark Schmerling. It’s customary, and the right thing to do, for writers (or at least publishers) to identify and credit the creator of photographs used to accompany an article.
This photograph is MINE. I made it in the fall of 2010, in Washington County, Pennsylvania, which, along with shale-bearing areas elsewhere, was being raped by this predatory and criminal industry.
Those nice homes and land will, some day, not too far off, be worthless, from their water source(s) being poisoned by gas well casing failure, or simple migration of drilling and fracking-related toxins into the wells. Many of these casings fail in just a year or two; nearly all will fail in 80-100 years.
And jobs? If not for corrupt elected and appointed officials, the fossil fuel and nuclear industries would be floating face up, and jobs in renewable energy (which have risen steadily in recent years), would skyrocket. And THOSE are much more healthful and sustainable jobs, where workers are treated much more like human beings.
The gas industry, as with the nuclear, coal and oil industries, maims and poisons its own workers, then operates in a state of denial about these facts. I’ve also spent enough time in the field to meet many people whose health, or the health of their children and grandchildren, has been badly affected by these psychopathic creeps.
For dirty energy CEOs, it’s NOT about jobs and energy; it’s about making immense sums of money fast, and externalizing as much cost as possible, as worker illness, injury and death, air and water pollution, land destruction, and a public health crisis that is only beginning. They do it simply because they can get away with it.
Then they have plenty of cash left to bribe those corrupt officials, and buy innocent-sounding TV and radio ads that are nothing but lies. They con the public about how clean their product is, while the sun shines and the wind blows, and the technology to harness and store the energy from those sources gets better and better.
What a load of unmitgated malarkey! Those numbers are about as inaccurate and unsupported as Terry Englander’s phony-baloney reserve estimates. The facts are that dry wells and frack sites outnumber productive ones, and the ratio is getting worse. GasCo’s are moving OUT, not in.
They must think this an episode of Mad Men.