3 PA Economics Profs Predict When Marcellus Employment Will Peak
A favorite pastime for people who support and for people who oppose fossil fuels is to throw around estimates of how long the Marcellus Shale will be around. How long will there be enough gas in the ground that drillers will actively pursue getting it out of the ground? On the anti-fossil fuel side you have discredited peak oil theorists like Art Berman who says we’re going to run out of gas in the next 10 years (see Peak Oil Theorist Art Berman Says Shale Gas is Peaking Too), and discredited “reporter” from the New York Times Ian Urbina who tries to make the case that shale drilling is nothing but a house of cards, a Ponzi scheme, ready to collapse at any time (see Unnamed Source in New York Times Anti-Gas Articles was…an Intern?!). On the pro-drilling side, we’ve personally heard Marcellus drillers state that they expect to still be drilling at least 40 years into the future, and possibly longer. Three economic professors from Indiana University of Pennsylvania recently published a research paper (copy below) in which they model employment in the coal industry to determine “peak employment” for coal and when it started to decrease–and they then applied the same model (with tweaks) to the Marcellus natural gas industry to predict when the industry will start to decline. What did they find?…
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MDN doesn’t do this (too) often, but we’re going to engage in a little Friday idle speculation. A tad bit of rumor mongering. So take this for what’s it worth. MDN has a contact in the Pittsburgh region that tells us that *all* of CONSOL Energy’s field engineers received an email at 3:30 am–this morning–requesting that they report to the center in Canonsburg, PA to discuss dismissal packages. Our contact says CONSOL’s plan is to lay down the rest of their active drilling rigs as soon as existing wells are completed and that they will not drill any new wells for the next 18 months. The really big bombshell is this: rumors are swirling that CONSOL’s CNX gas division is getting ready to sell itself to Noble Energy…
Poof! Some 151,000 jobs that had been created by the Marcellus Shale industry, according to Pennsylvania officials, disappeared overnight. PA Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration (Republican), voted out of office last November, used to say (based on numbers from the PA Dept. of Labor and Industry) that the Marcellus Shale industry is responsible for creating 240,000 jobs in the state (see