PA Senators Ask IFO to Check DEP’s Faulty Numbers re RGGI Carbon Tax
Two Pennsylvania Senators, Gene Yaw (Lycoming County) and John Yudichak (Luzerne County) have sent a letter to the state’s Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) asking the IFO to audit the modeling done by the inept Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) with respect to the price of credits being sold under the RGGI carbon tax scheme. PA Gov. Wolf intends to force the state, against the will of the people (i.e. the legislature that represents the people) to join RGGI, which slaps in insanely high carbon tax on all coal- and Marcellus gas-fired power plants. Yaw and Yudichak believe the DEP fudged the numbers with their original estimates of how much so-called RGGI credits cost. The senators want a neutral, independent third party to analyze the analysis done by the DEP.
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In May 2017, Murrysville Township (Westmoreland County) struck a zoning compromise with local drillers on the distance of setbacks (see 
In late October Nacero announced a $6 billion gas-to-liquids (GTL) refinery, to be built on the site of a former coal mine in Newport Township and Nanticoke in Luzerne County, PA (see 
Gene Barr, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, unloaded on Joe Biden and his inept energy policies in a recent op-ed in which Barr says it’s time for U.S. energy policy to stop empowering Russia. In addition to more oil drilling and oil pipelines, Barr advocates for more natural gas drilling and more natural gas pipelines here in the Marcellus/Utica. Do you want to help Europe? Stop blocking American oil and gas, President Biden!
The Washington County, PA Chamber of Commerce held its State of The Economy event yesterday. One of the speakers, Denise Brinley (former executive director of Pennsylvania’s Office of Energy) said that southwestern Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh region is a prime prospect to take advantage of establishing a $2 billion hydrogen hub. Western PA is in the “bullseye” of why funding was included in the recent federal infrastructure bill to establish four such hubs nationally, according to Brinley.
Penn State has launched a new research project to see if it can prove there is a link between water contamination in southwestern Pennsylvania and fracking. We’ve seen this movie before…or have we? In 2018 PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a liberal Democrat who sometimes supports the shale gas industry (as long as he can tax it) caved to demands from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to launch a “study” in a bid to “prove” cases of rare childhood cancer in southwestern PA can be tied to shale drilling in the region (see 
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According to the Bureau of Labor Statics, the oilfield services and equipment industry grew by over 7,000 jobs in December 2021. Marcellus/Utica companies can’t find enough workers to fill all of the open positions in our region, especially in Pennsylvania. According to an article in the Wellsboro Gazette (Tioga County, northeastern part of the state), companies in Tioga and Potter counties can’t fill all of their open positions.
Two days ago the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) gave a briefing and delivered a report to the PA Environmental Quality Board (EQB). Kurt Klapkowski, Director of the Bureau of Oil and Gas Planning and Program Management, said the state’s conventional oil and gas drilling companies only paid $46,100 of the $10.6 million it cost for the DEP to regulate that industry in FY 2020-21. That’s a pretty serious deficit. What is DEP suggesting as a fix?
In May 2017, Murrysville Township (Westmoreland County) struck a zoning compromise with local drillers on the distance of setbacks (see