What’s Wrong with the Employment Picture in the Marcellus? Ageism.
This is not an easy story to write. It’s about employment in the Marcellus Shale industry–and about age discrimination. Until late last year, by all accounts the Marcellus Shale industry was, from a jobs perspective, going great guns. Yes, sometimes it was/is necessary to import workers from other states to handle specialized jobs. But increasingly the jobs have been going to local workers and not out-of-staters. Yesterday we received a heartfelt letter (below) from an MDN subscriber. This gentleman is a mechanical engineer with degrees from Penn State and Lafayette College. He has loads of experience in a variety of areas–engineering, contracting, even running a small business. He wants to get involved with the greatest industry on the planet–the Marcellus Shale energy industry. He can paper every room in his house with the number of resumes and job applications he’s filled out. He’s applied for everything from technician to field hand to roustabout (he’s physically fit). In the last five years that he’s been trying, he hasn’t been called for a single interview. Not one. He’s now 52 years old. We don’t like calling attention to stories like this one, but MDN doesn’t shy away from sharing the “bad news” about our beloved industry along with the overwhelming good news…
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Rats fleeing a sinking ship? (Oops…Did we just say that with our out-loud voice??) It seems PA’s anti-drilling and law-breaking Attorney General Kathleen Kane can’t keep a press secretary. Kane, you may recall, is using Lanny Davis, lawyer for Bill “BJ in the Oval Office” Clinton who lied under oath (called perjury, a crime) to defend her. Davis was able to help Clinton keep his job as president, largely by smearing the special prosecutor in the case, Ken Starr. Kane figures Davis may be able to help her keep her job as PA’s AG, even though a grand jury found her to have broken the law and violated the oath of her office (see 
PA’s PennFutureDEP Acting Sec. John Quigley wants to get the big pipeline companies and the townships through which the pipelines will go to meet at the local Starbucks and “start a conversation.” Which latte do you like? Er no, not that kind of conversation. Quigley acknowledges he doesn’t have a thing to do with interstate pipelines–they’re approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Other agencies (federal and state) oversee the pipelines once they are built. But Quigley thinks if he can get both sides–pipeliners and towns–together and try to at least get a dialogue going, perhaps something good will come from it. Not a bad idea as ideas go. One recommendation: don’t tell the nutters which Starbucks you’re meeting at…
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been working on revisions to oil and gas regulations, something called Chapter 78, since 2011. In 2012 the new Act 13 drilling law required the DEP to update Chapter 78 to reflect the new reality of shale drilling. Over the past three years, the DEP held nine public hearings and received some 24,000 public comments on the proposed changes (see 
Have you ever played Jenga? You know, the game where you stack blocks of wood in mini-skyscraper style and then each player must remove a block from a lower level and stack it on the top until somebody pulls a block out and the whole thing comes crashing down. That’s the comparison used to describe the state budget recently proposed by PA Gov. Tom Wolf in none other than the reliably liberal, Democrat-supporting, anti-drilling Allentown Morning Call. As the Morning Call points out, Wolf has built his Jenga (house of cards) budget on soaking drillers with a new severance tax. When that doesn’t happen, the whole budget comes tumbling down and no one will be to blame except Tom Wolf himself…