Fracking in Pennsylvania hasn't gone as well as some may think [View all]

Twenty years after the state's first shale gas well was drilled, jobs comprise less than 1% of the workforce, residents fear health impacts and environmental damage continues.

One of the first job creation reports painted a rosy picture. Published in 2010 by Penn State University and paid for by the industry, it predicted fracking the Marcellus Shale formation would support 200,000 jobs by 2020. Six years later, another Penn State study with different authors reported about 26,000 direct jobs in the industry, half of which were filled by out-of-state residents.

Today, that number is even smaller. In March of 2024, the state reported 16,831 direct jobs in the industry, less than one half of 1% of all jobs.


Former Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Dave Hess, who writes the Pennsylvania Environmental Daily newsletter, pours over the well inspection reports issued by the DEP.

“What I see is the issue of polluted water supplies, of people being impacted by the air pollution around these facilities, people looking out their bedroom windows and 500 feet [away] is a flare shooting 25 feet up in the air, burning off excess natural gas,” said Hess. “All those issues are still there.”

Hess raised alarms in a recent post that listed, in the course of one week in September, 62 notices of violations of conventional wells and seven for fracked wells, bringing the total year-to-date violations to 721 for fracked shale gas wells, and a whopping 5,857 violations for the more shallow conventional wells. The state has had conventional wells, which don’t use fracking to tap the reserves, for more than 100 years. While there are a lot more conventional wells, they do not produce nearly as much oil and gas as the deeper fracked wells.


Article: https://whyy.org/articles/fracking-pennsylvania-shale-gas-workforce-health-environmental-damage/