Pa. should lease land to drill natural gas to improve parks

The Jan. 29 Post-Gazette article, “Report says Pa. Parks, Forests Need $1B in Work,” highlighted an estimated maintenance backlog of more than $1 billion for the commonwealth’s 112 state parks and 2.2 million acres of state forest land.

Overlooked in this discussion is the missed opportunity by the Gov. Tom Wolf administration through its moratorium on leasing additional land for natural gas development that could quickly erase the backlog and improve the parks and forests.

Leasing state land is not new. More than 74 leases have been signed and 2,000 wells drilled in Pennsylvania since 1947. State land leased for Marcellus Shale development in 2008-2009 produced $413 million in bonus payments and continuing annual royalty revenue of $80100 million, though some of that revenue was diverted to the general fund.

Today’s multi-well pads and horizontal drilling techniques would allow additional vast amounts of natural gas to be extracted with no surface disturbance, consistent with Gov. Tom Corbett’s 2014 executive order requiring natural gas on state lands to be accessed from well pads on adjacent private property.

Between 2010 and 2016, Pennsylvania received more than $830 million from all associated natural gas development activity on state forest land, and a 2018 Department of Conservation and Natural Resources report found “water quality monitoring efforts by the [forestry] bureau and its partners have not raised significant concerns on state forest headwaters to date.”

Only 2 percent of Pennsylvania’s total state forest acreage has been affected by shale gas development. Opening just a small percentage of additional land for non-surface impact energy development will take a huge bite out of the state’s public lands maintenance backlog.

DAN WEAVER

Marshall

The writer is the president and executive director of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association.