PIOGA Leads the Charge to Defeat Wolf’s Severance Tax
Louis D. D’Amico, President & Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA), is leading the effort to defeat PA Gov. Tom Wolf’s Marcellus-killing, 7.5% severance tax. While virtually everyone else looked away in embarrassment and otherwise ignored Wolf’s threat that you either take this tax like a man or you’ll get banned “like New York,” Lou D’Amico is not looking away and not pretending Wolf never said it. Wolf did say it and he meant it–and he must be stopped. Below is an excellent column Lou recently wrote in which he parses the governor’s comments and offers the industry’s response–setting the record straight. By the way, Lou will be the Guest of Honor at this year’s Oil & Gas Awards event in Pittsburgh on March 25…
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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…
Using the same class warfare language all Democrats resort to when they want to justify their enormous appetite for taxing and spending, yesterday Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf introduced the highest-ever budget in PA and attempted to lay a huge theft, in the form of a so-called severance tax, on the Marcellus industry by saying, “We deserve to be fairly compensated for the use of our resources.” Just one problem Tom: IT’S NOT YOUR RESOURCES! The resources in question belong to private landowners and your proposal to steal their money, along with the money of the drillers who risk a lot of capital to drill, is abhorrent. The justification is that the money stolen will be given “to the children”–by which he means given to teachers’ unions who turned out the vote for him. The Wolf budget landed yesterday–with a thud–and it calls for $1 billion in taxes on the Marcellus industry. Wolf thinks he can get buy-in by ensuring $225 million of that amount will be kept local, like the old “impact fee.” That’s the payoff to try and get support for this Marcellus-killing budget. He plans to fork over the rest of it to Big Education as their reward for voting for him. Even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette calls his budget “a miss” and “utter folly.” Can you believe that? It’s so bad even the anti-drilling editors at the Post-Gazette don’t like it…