New Drilling-Related Jobs Coming to NY Next Year
When drilling finally starts in New York State, one of the immediate benefits to the state will be jobs. And not all of those jobs will be in the drilling industry. Some of them will be for the agency that oversees drilling in New York, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
The latest word is that the DEC is looking to hire an addition 142 workers starting next year, many of them in New York’s Southern Tier area where drilling will happen first.
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Early today, Norse Energy, a Norwegian company with gas drilling operations in New York State, issued an interesting press release about laying off half of their employees (see the full release below). Norse holds some 180,000 net acres of natural gas leases in New York, of which 130,000 are in the Marcellus and Utica Shale zones.
Shell Oil is “nearing a decision” on where to build a multi-billion dollar ethylene cracker plant in the Marcellus region, and states in that region—specifically Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio—are aggressively competing to have the plant built in their state. (See 
Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon on Monday appeared on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money show on CNBC to talk about the company’s new, oil-rich discovery in the Utica Shale of eastern Ohio. He had some fascinating things to say, including that he expects there to be some 25,000 wells drilled in the Ohio Utica Shale, and that there will be $10 billion per year for at least 20 years (or $200 billion) of investments in the Ohio Utica Shale alone. Yikes! No wonder Gov. John Kasich is “gushing” about Chesapeake’s discovery. An investment of 1/5 of a trillion dollars is a major big deal for Ohio—not only for landowners but also for businesses and for those who will be employed by drilling and associated industries. You cannot overstate how important this discovery is.
One of the favorite arguments used as a smokescreen by those opposed to Marcellus drilling is the classic class warfare argument. But it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to make it work in this case as the people who are supposedly the “fat cats” and the “lucky few winners of life’s lottery” are typically family farmers who have been scraping by for generations, just trying to hold on to the land they love. The fact that some of them “get rich” from gas drilling just doesn’t sit right with the elite city-dwellers. Kind of invokes images of the Beverly Hillbillies.