House And Senate Impact Fees Fall Short, Report Says

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

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.

November 7, 2011 | 3:35 PM

Even the gas industry agrees that Pennsylvania’s bonding requirements for wells in the Marcellus shale are woefully inadequate.
But a peer-reviewed study about to be published in the journal ‘Environmental Science & Technology’ by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University indicates the plans to bring those requirements up to date are inadequate as well.
“The House and Senate proposals are well short of what is needed,” said lead author Austin Mitchell.

Whereas current proposals could raise bonds to $10,000 per well, the Carnegie Mellon study shows the average cost to actually plug a Marcellus well to be ten times that much, with the wells in Dimock costing Cabot Oil & Gas 70 times more: an average of $700,000 each.
The study cautions that as gas production declines, current regulations make it easy to transfer wells to smaller operators lacking the resources to adequately plug a well.
This, they say, creates “a financial incentive to not comply with reclamation requirements.”