FREEDOM, Pennsylvania — In a Beaver County town whose sense of self is in many ways intertwined with the shale industry, Vice President Mike Pence last week reminded the people who work there that they significantly contribute to the country’s economic freedom and national security.
“An American energy renaissance has come to Pennsylvania and all across the heartland,” said Pence, adding that President Trump has cut taxes, rolled back federal red tape, reduced regulations, and backed an energy policy that has made America less dependent on foreign oil.
“For the first time since I think the 1970s, the United States is now both an exporter of energy but also has shaken its reliance on foreign oil. This is a good thing,” said Rich Weber, chairman and CEO of PennEnergy Resources, where Pence spoke on Thursday.
“We have an abundance of natural gas, and we have the ability to change the geopolitical calculus in the world,” Weber said. “We can supply natural gas, clean-burning natural gas, to Europe, and we can supply clean-burning, natural gas to Asia, and we are doing so. That is economic freedom.”
Pence was speaking to the employees of PennEnergy Resources at an event on a gravel parking lot in blistering heat at a natural gas drilling site, one of many owned by the company, which operates in several western Pennsylvania counties.
Pence was joined on stage with some of the employees in hard hats and masks to his left, with the rest of the employees and some PennEnergy contractors in the audience. Weber said the crowd size did not exceed 250, the number allowed by the state under the current COVID-19 restrictions, and most in attendance were employees.
Behind Pence was a simple but powerful sign with JOBS, JOBS, JOBS written across it: a message important to the workers here who feel an uncertainty for the future of their jobs if former vice president Joe Biden is elected president.
Biden was in Pittsburgh last week, where he made an about-face on his position on natural gas hydraulic fracturing, saying he now supports it after promising several times in the past year to eliminate it. Biden’s waffling is seen by these workers as a threat to their own employment and to all the indirect jobs and benefits that also have come from the shale boom.
Biden’s flip-flop does not sit well with Weber, who says he is tired of hearing one thing in one city and another in his own backyard.
Pennsylvania is the country’s second-largest natural gas-producing state, generating 20% of the total production in the United States, with horizontal shale wells in production in 33 of the state’s 67 counties.
A Chamber of Commerce study released last year showed that any type of ban of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania would cause a more than $200 billion hit to the state’s GDP and cause the state and localities to lose $23 billion in tax revenue. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the shale industry directly and indirectly supports the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians.
The shale industry hit a sluggish spot several months before COVID-19 struck, mainly because the global energy market was flooded with supply. Yet, less than a few miles from this site, a mammoth ethane cracker plant operated by Royal Dutch Shell company, spanning nearly 400 acres and employing thousands of people, will produce more than 1 million tons of plastic each year by the time it is completed.
While the abundance of energy workers live in the less populated counties in the state, their potential electoral impact wasn’t calculated ahead of the 2016 election by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Trump went on to best her by a slim margin, largely on the backs of voters who live in counties such as Beaver, as well as Butler and Armstrong, where PennEnergy Resources has production sites.
Weber began his business with his partner, Greg Muse, over a couple of beers at a now-defunct bar in the old Union Trust Building in the city of Pittsburgh.
“We literally started our company with a pencil and some paper,” he said. Today, they directly employ 120 people and contract with several hundred more, all of whom come from a variety of skill sets.
“Most of the people that work directly for my company have engineering degrees,” Weber said. “We also have geologists, petrophysicists, a finance staff that handles a large land department for our over 20,000 different landowner partners, most of whom are farmers, and then our blue-collar workers.”
He added: “People really have no idea who a typical natural gas employee is because it is so diverse.”
Equally diverse are the places where those employees live, which run the gamut from the well-heeled suburbs of Sewickley to the middle-class neighborhoods that make up most of Beaver, Butler, and Armstrong counties — places that are also dotted with farms that are often partners with shale companies.
No matter where they live, people are going to vote their pocketbook and their community’s well-being.
Weber thinks if Biden really supported hydraulic fracturing, he should have said it at a well or the Shell cracker plant when he was in western Pennsylvania.
“And, you know, I object to the whole term fracking,” Weber said. “You know, I think the only reason the media use that term is because it sounds like a swear word.”
Weber didn’t get to meet Pence last Thursday, but he felt a deep sense of accomplishment that the company he and his partner started was visited by the sitting vice president of the United States.
“You know, we are very honored. We’re a small, privately owned company, and for the vice president of the United States to come and make a speech at our location is something that we’re honored to support. And we like the message that the vice president and the president have to say about energy independence in the United States, as well as the support of people that work in the industry.”
He added: “You know, we are often maligned in the media, unfairly in our view, and our whole story is rarely told. Whether you’re talking about economic opportunity and jobs or how we have significantly lowered the energy costs in the United States, or how we have caused our country to reduce its carbon footprint or the freedom from foreign oil, we are making a positive impact.”
Those that work in the industry directly and indirectly also have the possibility of having an effect on the election.
