Martian Sighting in Harrisburg – Keep Wells Away from Schools
Where’s HG Wells when you need him? We’ve had another Martian sighting! At yesterday’s PA Dept. of Environmental Protection Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board (TAB) meeting, Amy Nassif, representing some of the parents from the Mars School district in Butler County, PA, addressed TAB members imploring them to “keep oil and gas well pads away from schools.” Aaah, Ms. Nassif–what about well pads that already exist ON SCHOOL PROPERTY? Like the well pad at the Elk Lake School in Susquehanna County (see Rural NE PA School Nets $1.7M in Royalties from 2 Marcellus Wells). Should they rip out their two wells–wells that haven’t harmed a single student and have brought in millions of dollars for the school?…
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As we told you Tuesday, Ohio is now squarely in the ethane cracker race (see 
Earth Day was celebrated in 192 countries around the world yesterday, including the U.S. We celebrate old Mother Earth here at MDN HQ each and every day. We love this dirt ball on which we live. An MDN reader and friend sent us a link to a Youtube video that properly celebrates and provides context for Earth Day (watch it below). To properly celebrate Earth Day, you need to include a celebration of fossil fuels–which have done more to clean up the earth than any other factor. Yes, you read that right. Fossil fuels are the reason we have cleaner air, cleaner water and live longer than ever. So today, one day late, we celebrate “setting fire to corpses of animals and plants unearthed from 400 million-year-old cemeteries”–which is how anti-driller Sandra Steingraber describes fossil fuels…
As MDN told you last week, natural gas production in Pennsylvania went DOWN from January to February 2015 (see 
Wow–who woulda thunk? Drillers in West Virginia paid double the amount of revenue in severance taxes in 2014 than they did in 2013–a total of $188 million. Those numbers are approaching the total haul for the tax/impact fee in Pennsylvania (a little over $200 million each year). But there’s a big difference between the revenue raised in WV and PA. In PA, 60% of the revenue raised stays local with the towns and counties where drilling occurs, and 40% goes to the state and other geographies. We call the 40% “walking around money” (i.e. extortion) that politicians had to agree to in order to get any kind of deal done that remotely approaches common sense. In WV however, an eye-popping 90% of the severance revenue raised goes to the state–to disappear through politicians’ fingers–while a meager 7.5% stays in the counties that see drilling…