Vertical Exploratory Wells Won't Be Hit With Fee

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

February 14, 2012 | 3:26 PM

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The Scranton Times-Tribune points out an important distinction, when it comes to which of the roughly 4,000 Marcellus Shale wells spudded between 2005 and 2011 will be assessed a $50,000 or $10,000 impact fee:

Vertical exploratory wells that have never been hydraulically fractured and do not produce gas, like the two drilled in Lackawanna County and the eight drilled in Wayne County, will not be eligible for the fee.
“Our concern was that truly exploratory wells do not pay the impact fee,” said Drew Crompton, chief of staff for Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, R-25, Jefferson County. He added that the local impact of such wells is relatively minor and “quite frankly, we don’t want to discourage exploratory wells.”
On the other hand, the bill presumes that horizontal wells are not exploratory so even those not producing gas are eligible for the fee, he said.
That means Luzerne County’s two test wells, both of which are horizontal, will be subject to the $50,000 per well fee if the county adopts it, despite the fact that both were plugged after they showed little prospect of producing economic amounts of gas.

Wondering how much money your county will receive? We’ve mapped out county-by-county fee totals here.