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Town of Rochester, NY will Vote on Frack Ban August 30th

spitIt looks like the Town of Rochester, NY (in addition to the City of Rochester) is about to turn down potential jobs and investment in their economically depressed community by spitting in the face of the shale drilling industry. That is, they plan to ban drilling at a town board meeting on August 30.

Not only will the measure they plan to vote on completely ban fracking, it will also ban “transferring, storing, processing and disposing of materials related to horizontal hydraulic fracturing.” They won’t even allow new buildings to be built related to fracking—so if you’re a law firm that represents a driller and want to build a new office, forget it.

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New Utica Supply Chain Website for Ohio Businesses

A new online service displays more than 700 companies in a 12-county region of Ohio that provide services and supplies to the Utica and Marcellus Shale drilling industry on an interactive map. The Ohio Shale Energy “supply chain” website provides a valuable service for businesses looking to plug in to the ever-expanding energy industry in Ohio.

Now that the site is up and running, there are plans to expand it to cover the entire state.

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Advice for Companies Seeking to Work for Drilling Industry

Do you work for, or own, a company interested in working with gas and oil drilling companies in the Marcellus/Utica Shale (often referred to as plugging in to the “supply chain”)? According to a speaker at a seminar in Ohio yesterday, the drilling industry is interested in one thing above all else: the safety of its workers.

If you want to plug in to opportunities in the industry, here’s some advice:

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Poll: New Yorkers Remain Split on Fracking, Some Surprises

Each month the Siena College Research Institute conducts a statewide poll in New York to gage opinions on various political issues and politicians. For several years running they have polled on the question of whether or not New Yorkers support shale gas drilling and fracking. The unsurprising results again for this month are that statewide, New Yorkers are evenly split for and against fracking (see the results embedded below).

However, when you dig into the numbers, a surprising fact emerges about the geography people live in who favor drilling versus the geography of those who don’t.

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Health Care Systems Partner to Study Marcellus Impacts

Guthrie Health, a regional health care provider in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York serving 200,000 residents in 11 counties, along with Geisinger Health System, serving 2.6 million residents in 44 counties in northeastern and central Pennsylvania, have joined forces to study the health impacts of Marcellus Shale drilling.

Using medical records of their patients who live near drilling, preliminary results of the study on how drilling may (or may not) affect asthma, cardiovascular disease and cancer are targeted to be released sometime next year, while other data will take longer—up to 15 years.

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Marcellus-based Firm Expands to Service Other Shale Plays

MDN doesn’t usually run press releases issued by companies apart from earnings and operations reports from drillers, or announcements of major new projects and deals. We see plenty of “we’ve just added two new people to our regional office in Mayberry” announcements and “we’ve just opened a new branch office in Pittsburgh” announcements. No big deal. It’s a “dog bites man” type of story.

But when a company that started life in the Marcellus/Utica region expands because of Marcellus/Utica drilling and opens a large regional office in other shale basin areas, that’s a “man bites dog” type of story, and one we think worth highlighting. Such is the case with RETTEW, a Lancaster-PA based company that provides engineering, consulting and construction-related services to the drilling industry.

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