The Rust Belt Comes Back To Life: Shale Gas Revolution Could Bring 200,000 Jobs To Ohio
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No one in Steubenville can remember the last time anyone heard of a job that paid as much as $77,000 a year coming to town, but those jobs are coming. There could be more than 200,000 of them in Ohio in the next few years.”
Thousands or even millions of guaranteed new jobs would be created throughout the country, bringing full employment to cities like Steubenville, Ohio. Increased domestic production of oil and gas wouldn’t require a penny of taxpayer subsidies or government spending, and instead would actually generate millions of dollars of government revenue from oil taxes and royalties.
In additions to more jobs, another benefit of increased natural gas production is that it would help lower energy costs for American manufacturers, increasing their competitiveness. The National Association of Manufacturers explains:
“Manufacturers, users of approximately one-third of the energy consumed in the United States, strongly support the use of hydraulic fracturing to access our nation’s abundant supply of natural gas. We use natural gas not only as a source of electricity, but as a feedstock for products such as plastics, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals. Affordable natural gas provides manufacturers with the ability to expand their facilities, increase production and create even more jobs. It is critically important that the states and the federal government not stand in the way of our access to these valuable resources.”

The Marcellus and Utica Shale areas can become a rescue for the besotten Rust Belt. But, at what cost? Five million gallons of salty, poisonus water for each well, transported by 500 Tanker Trucks, weighing 60,000 pounds each, injected three to eight thousand feet underground, only 750,000 gallons of which is recovered. The recovered, untreatable, used fracking fluid must be contained in great numbers of storage tanks on-site, saved for transporting and re-use all over the area.
This is not new technology; the risk of well accidents is well documented (and recently experienced nation wide). The Industry technology must not be allowed to race ahead of safety controls, which must be imposed in advance, rather than appologetic after-the-fact patches that do not have the effectiveness of a planned cautionary approach. The Industry needs an emergency reserve fund, imposed coincident with drilling permits, buttressed with precautionary overflow dams, lined with polution proof rubber shields.
The World’s next crisis is expected to be over water…the lack thereof. Two and a half billion gallons needed to Ohio’s wells alone is a doable number but that too must be monitored…in the Great Lakes area as well as in water table volume and quality.
The reputation of the energy business is renowned for “Damn the Torpedoes…Drill Baby Drill”
fish1
The technology is ready to do this. Rather than sitting on our hands and allowing our economy to permently disintegrate we need to act now. People need jobs and we need fossil fuel in order to grow as a society. It is going to be a while until new forms of energy are economically viable