Fracking is the way to save your community! With fracking, your community can generate more jobs for the local community and get you higher wages! Not only that but it will bring the prices of natural gas and energy down to beat inflation. We will bring in so much additional money to support your local economy - and fracking is even better than coal - generating less CO2 and more jobs, so the entire community benefits!
This is usually the narrative that is pushed to encourage fracking in local communities. So, it’s no wonder that 84% of residents in Pennsylvania believed that fracking was essential to their state’s economy. However, is this narrative actually correct? The short answer is no; there are many costs that outweigh the financial gains, and in most cases, the financial gains are overstated and do not even remain in the community where the drilling is located. It is ultimately an unfortunate tale that is rooted in providing hope and promise to a community that then ultimately exploits them. Industry reports often use projected data that overstates job and wage gains by 10-100 times the actual reality to convince the community this is a good idea, and then leave the town with all of the negative after-effects, such as poor air quality, damaged waterways, and worsening health and economies. These effects are confined to the community and the promised benefits never reach them.
Figures 1 and 2 visually summarize the contrasting narratives surrounding fracking. While industry claims project a $12 billion growth in Pennsylvania’s economy, the reality—accounting for environmental, social, and health costs—reveals a net decline of $7 billion. Figure 2 categorizes fracking's impacts into short-term (during active drilling) and long-term (after drilling ends), as well as local versus global effects. Positive impacts are highlighted in green while negative impacts are shown in red. These figures clearly highlight the disparity between the promises made to communities and the exploitation they ultimately endure.
In this blog post, I aim to unpack the nuanced impacts of fracking across short- and long-term horizons, as well as local versus global effects, using Pennsylvania as a case study. By examining both short-term gains and long-term consequences, we can better understand how fracking affects not only local communities but also broader systems of sustainability planning.
Fracking: A Brief Overview
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a technique used to extract oil and natural gas trapped in underground rock formations. The process involves drilling into shale rock layers and injecting a mixture of water, sand (proppants), and chemicals at high pressure to create fractures in the rock. These fractures allow trapped hydrocarbons to flow into the wellbore for extraction.
Modern fracking combines horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing to access previously inaccessible deposits. Each well uses millions of gallons of water mixed with chemical additives that include gelling agents, acids, stabilizers, and friction reducers. While fracking has significantly increased U.S. energy production and lowered energy costs, it has also raised concerns about its environmental impact, including methane emissions, groundwater contamination, and ecosystem disruption.
Economics - The main selling point of fracking
The main selling point to entice communities into fracking is the promise of increased jobs and wages. This is especially tempting, as these communities are often 95% rural and face challenges with job growth and innovation. Industry reports frequently attempt to lure these communities by providing job and wage projections about what could happen if they allow fracking. For instance, in Ohio, an industry report claimed fracking would increase wages by $12 billion and create 200,000 jobs. The reality? An additional $284 million was created from 20,000 jobs. This creates a lot of confusing and misplaced expectations as to what can happen in a community, so what are the true benefits coming from economic factors such as job growth, local economic spending, long-run economic growth, lower energy prices, rural land conversion, and increased tax base?
Job Growth
Fracking, like other energy sector jobs, is very capital intensive and not labor intensive, and is even less labor intensive than other popular industries such as coal. As such, there is already a ceiling to the number of jobs that could be created. As fracking technology becomes more innovative and advanced, the number of jobs required will also decline over time. In addition, with the fracking process, the majority of jobs (98%) are created at the beginning and not needed later in the lifecycle. As shown in the plot below for Pennsylvania, in the boom period of fracking from 2010 to 2014, many new jobs were created as fracking production increased. However, once fracking reaches a certain part in the lifecycle around 2015, production continues to increase, but jobs decline as production becomes less labor intensive.
In PA, from 2007 to 2024:
Fracking jobs created = 7,000
This is due to 22,000 jobs being added in the boom period from 2010 to 2014, but then a job loss of 15,000 jobs from the bust period of 2014 to 2024 as these jobs transitioned away from manual labor into more machinery-intensive tasks.
Fracking wages = $105,000 per year
For comparison, this represents about 0.7% of the workforce who make an average wage of $55,000. In total, this results in creating $1.6 billion for the economy in PA. In comparison, shale producers received profits of $77 billion over this time period. However, this value goes to producers and corporations, and this money does not get channeled back into the community, which creates a large discrepancy.
However, this isn’t the complete picture of job change in fracking; there are two additional pieces related to changes in the labor market, including job losses, additional job creation, and migrant workers.
Job Losses
As the majority of fracking occurs on rural land, there are 4 main industries that are harmed and impacted by using more of this land to develop fracking:
Coal - As the energy sector shifts away from using coal to the more readily cheap and available natural gas, some of the jobs that were originally in the coal sector are destroyed due to the declining demand in coal.
In PA, over this time period, 2,300 coal jobs were destroyed over time, making an average wage of $62,000.
Tourism - 96% of shale is located on rural land, and in many of these communities, they rely on tourism for a large portion of their economic needs. For comparison in PA, there were 489,000 jobs in tourism in 2017; this is 29 times the number of jobs in fracking. In the long run of shale developments, as habitat decreases, this reduces the revenues coming from hunting, fishing, and general recreation in these areas.
In PA shale counties, 52% of people encountered shale activity while recreating in these areas, and 39% said they then avoided these areas because of shale.
Forestry and Agriculture - When land gets converted for shale development, the other two main sectors that get impacted are forestry and agriculture. In some cases, you can no longer harvest on the land once it’s been converted for shale development. In other cases, farmers must switch to more profitable crops to fallow. Depending on the community and the severity of the air and water pollution, the land productivity steeply declines, and the land can no longer support the amount of agricultural productivity as before.
In PA, due to shale development, 11,000 hectares of forest and 19,000 hectares of agriculture were destroyed. Together, this results in losing profits of $494 million to farmers.
Job Migration
Because these communities are smaller rural communities, they don’t have much additional infrastructure to support this influx of new job creation, sometimes in the 1,000s of workers. That raises two questions: Who is taking these new jobs? And where are they living?
The majority of people taking these jobs are not living in the county where the shale gas extraction is happening and are commuting from over 25 miles away. About only ⅓ of the jobs that are created are going to residents of the county; the rest are going to others living outside of the county or migrants. In PA, about 37% of the shale jobs go to non-PA residents, 30% go to county residents where the shale is located, and the rest to PA residents living outside the shale county. The promise for higher-paying jobs incentivizes others to want to join in, coupled with unaffordable housing prices in the county due to increased demand, and the cyclical nature of fracking leads people to compete for these jobs. In addition, the people moving in for these jobs are more likely to be male, unmarried, young, and less educated than movers more generally, which leads to many social and health issues discussed later.
This means that in PA, out of the $1.6 billion that was created, only $550 million is going to county residents living in the county where the shale is located, and who were promised the entirety of the local employment gains.
Additional Job Creation
To be able to support this creation of new jobs and in-migration, other jobs are needed to support this growth, often referred to as spillover jobs. The community now needs people to build new roads, to be in restaurants, to support the hotels. Research has shown that for every 1 job created in the shale sector, this creates an additional 0.3-0.7 additional jobs in other sectors. However, because the majority of these job workers are living in other counties, the majority of this spending and job creation goes to other communities.
In PA from 2010 to 2020, this means:
In the shale counties, 1,200 jobs were created, averaging $55,000 per year, leading to an extra $63 million.
In non-shale counties, 2,400 jobs were created, averaging $55,000 per year, leading to an extra $129 million.
Long-Run Economic Growth
A key factor in sustaining economic growth is job creation and wage growth, which is done through training and educating people today. While in the short run, fracking provides additional jobs, over the lifecycle of shale development, those jobs start to disappear. In addition, these higher-paying jobs provide an incentive in the short run for people to abandon their education in order to provide for their families today. In shale counties, 1% fewer men finish their high school degrees and 2% fewer enroll in college due to the incentive of these higher-paying jobs. While this may benefit them in the short run, when the shale jobs are gone (due to the lifecycle nature of shale development), they will be at a disadvantage due to lower education and no transferable skills to other jobs unless they choose to continue to move to other cities where new shale pockets are found.
In addition to the lower education, entrepreneurship rates also decrease in shale towns. There are fewer people working for themselves and creating new products, ideas, and businesses, which hampers local economic growth in the long run.
As discussed in more detail below, additional environmental health effects decrease productivity over time. Air and water quality issues, in addition to increased mental health disturbances, decrease productivity by forcing people to stay home from work and school as well as making people less productive once they get to work. This impacts long-run growth through missed-out productivity.
Collectively, using CIW data, in PA, this missed-out long-run growth has cost shale counties $28 billion over this time period.
Lower Prices
Due to the increased supply of natural gas, the price of natural gas energy has declined from $4.5 KwH in 2010 to $1.88 KWh in 2017. This has led to large energy cost savings in households by decreasing energy bills by $42 million in PA alone.
Taxes
Another selling point of fracking is the increased taxes through increased gas extraction, property tax, income tax, and land taxes, depending on the state where the shale is mined. While these taxes are claimed they will be used to help the community, where do they actually go? The largest share goes to state spending; the local spending goes to infrastructure investments such as building more roads for all the traffic. While some money goes to schooling, the majority goes to capital projects and debt service, rather than hiring and retaining teachers, which ultimately leads to lower per-pupil funding for schooling and lower school achievement. In addition, any landowners that receive royalties or lease payments from their land save or invest about 55% of that money instead of spending it locally.
Tax collection is different in every state. In PA, there are no severance taxes once oil and gas are removed from the ground, but there are taxes once the oil and gas are sold. This results in $210 million per year in PA, but because only a small fraction is spent in these shale communities, from 2010 to 2024, this results in a total of $1.9 billion back to the community.
Collectively, these economic effects are split into 4 groups: short-term effects that happen during the boom and long-run effects that happen during the bust or once shale gas production begins to shift to capital-intensive extraction as opposed to labor-intensive construction, and benefits that go to communities where the shale gas extraction is occurring and outer communities where shale gas extraction isn’t happening, but they still receive benefits.
Below is a figure which focuses on the difference in short and long-run effects in PA over time. In comparison to the total job benefits, something that is promised to be a huge positive effect for PA communities that focus on shale extraction, is only positive during the boom cycle and is negative during the bust cycle. In addition, these effects are quite small compared to the long-run growth effects and the benefit to local energy prices for all households. While the decline in energy prices for households is now holding steady and not making the large decline in prices achieved from 2015-2021, the decline in long-run human capital is still continuing to decline at fast rates because of the long-lasting health effects from fracking, in addition to the continued loss of educational attainment, and missed-out job growth in younger ages is much harder to recover from over time. Collectively, the net economic effect is negative $23 billion for PA.
Splitting these out into local effects where the shale is getting extracted and global effects for other communities in PA where there is no shale extracted, we can see that the benefits just keep increasing over time for local communities where there is no shale extracted through increasing household energy savings. However, in communities where shale extraction is happening, the costs keep increasing over time, as the effects of job loss, destruction of other industries, and declining long-term growth cannot outpace the increases in taxes and declining energy spending of households. Even the so-called economic benefits from fracking, which is the main selling point of fracking to these communities, is causing these communities to be worse off in both the short and long term, while other nearby PA communities gain at the expense of the shale communities which must bear all of the costs.
Environmental Impact on Health
There are many environmental issues that impact both short- and long-term health quality in fracking counties. These issues mostly stem from air and water quality problems created throughout the fracking process. Air quality issues arise through the release of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from construction and transport. Water quality issues arise through groundwater contamination that occurs throughout drilling.
Fracking can affect several inputs into health production, from individual pollution exposure (predominantly through air and water) to more indirect inputs that can alter health-related decision-making. Indirect inputs include income (from increased employment, royalty payments for mineral rights owners, and reduced energy costs) and education (both through individual attainment decisions and public spending).
The drivers of these risks are the chemicals and materials used in the fracking process, as well as the subterranean materials brought to the surface through extraction. The support infrastructure for the fracking process, including compressors, pipelines, and trucks, also produces health impacts through air quality issues, noise, and safety concerns. The adverse health effects of fracking are exacerbated by leaks, improper storage, and negligence.
Air Quality
The most well-studied environmental effects come from air quality issues. Fracking releases VOCs, which later turn into PM2.5. These are tiny air particles that can damage lungs and later impact mental health, as well as certain chronic breathing conditions. Not only does PM2.5 cause chronic health conditions, but it also causes premature death rates. Empirically, there is no safe level of PM2.5 for humans to breathe, and any amount is dangerous to human health. According to the EPA, the oil and gas industry is the largest source of volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions in the U.S.
Not only does PM2.5 affect local communities most heavily, but due to wind patterns in the US, this particulate matter can travel many states away. A study in the Permian Basin, which spans across New Mexico and Texas, shows that PM2.5 travels northeast, causing an additional 212 deaths per year within the Permian Basin and 426 outside of the Permian Basin, occurring all the way up to New York State. These air quality issues do not stop once fracking ends and have been found in communities up to 5 years after fracking ends.
Five counties in Pennsylvania rank in the top 24 counties in the United States for the most year-round particulate pollution.
Water Quality
Contamination of groundwater occurs if wells are not properly sealed, as well as through leakages when piping happens. In addition to this contamination, methane is also found in the water supply in nearby fracking communities. Over time, the infrastructure of wells (e.g., well casings) will deteriorate, which is likely to cause pollution into groundwater in the future. The impact of well drilling on groundwater resources will likely be one of the biggest legacy impacts of fracking activity. The EPA identified 1,084 unique chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing between 2005 and 2013.
In PA, a study that analyzed samples from over 60 private drinking water wells found methane in 51 of those overlying the Marcellus Shale in northeastern PA. This contamination can last years and has been present in communities for years after the fracking has stopped. Studies find that an additional gas well within a kilometer of groundwater sources increases UOGD-related contaminants, on average, by around 1 percent. As of April 2019, the Pennsylvania DEP officially acknowledges 339 cases of groundwater contamination caused by Marcellus Shale UOGD development.
In addition to the actual risk of increased contamination, there is also an increased perceived risk of contamination, as many households purchase their own water from the store to avoid potential contamination. In PA, these households spent $19 million in total expenditures for shale-gas counties in 2010 on bottled water to avoid this risk.
Mental Health and Sleep
Sleep disruption was the most commonly reported symptom of people living within one kilometer of a well in Pennsylvania, with 43.1% reporting that they had been affected. This is due to the increased light pollution, plus air and water quality issues. In communities with fracking, there is an increase in sleeplessness and poor sleep. Researchers believe the combination of all these issues results in a decline of mental health within the community. Mental health outcomes decline by 2% in fracking communities.
Child Health Outcomes
There are short-term health problems in children, such as the increase in asthma from worsening air quality. However, there are also long-term health quality issues, such as low birth weight for newborns. In communities that experience fracking, there is an increased chance of having a newborn of low birth weight if the mother is experiencing fracking in-utero. In PA, living within 1 mile of a UOGD well is associated with a 25 percent increase in probability of low-birth weights.
Opioid Use
For people working in shale communities, opioid use increases, as well as drug-related mortality. This is especially an issue in the Midwest, PA/OH/WV region. This is due to a combination of long hours on stressful jobs, as well as the transitory nature of work.
These overall impacts not only affect short-term health quality within the community but also impact longer-term employment and productivity. People who are less healthy miss more days at work and find it harder to work once they are at work. In addition, these impacts—particularly air quality—also impact premature mortality.
Collectively, these impacts on short-term health quality, premature mortality, and productivity are shown below. The effects on all factors are exacerbated over time as more and more issues and pollution accumulate.
The impacts are broken down further by the percentage coming from air quality, water quality, premature birth, mental health issues, and opioid use. Mental health accounts for 79.2%, followed by low birth weight and air quality both at 6.9%, and opioid use at 4%.
Other Environmental Impacts
Fracking and natural gas extraction also have other environmental impacts that do not directly impact community-level health outcomes but impact global human health outcomes, biodiversity, or climate.
Emissions
Natural gas is often celebrated as a bridge fuel, shifting first from coal (which heavily pollutes carbon (CO2)) then transitioning to cleaner alternatives. While it’s true that natural gas emits less CO2 than coal, the main emissions issue with natural gas is methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas 86 times more efficient at warming the atmosphere than carbon over a 20-year time frame. In the short term, if you’re only examining CO2, then natural gas seems better. However, once you account for both CO2 and methane, natural gas could be worse. Although atmospheric methane has a relatively short half-life (7 years) compared with carbon dioxide (27 years), it is estimated to be 86 times more potent over 20 years, meaning that it contributes much more to climate change. When considering the full lifecycle of natural gas, estimates are that the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint is more than 20 percent greater than coal over twenty years and roughly equivalent over 100 years.
Long-Run Energy Growth
This, however, isn’t the end of the emissions story. Another study shows that once communities begin relying on using natural gas through fracking, there is less innovation in creating greener and less damaging energy alternatives because of the narrative that natural gas is better than coal for the climate. This is similar to what happens to long-run economic growth and innovation; because the community has been sold a story that natural gas and fracking has saved their local economies, they no longer focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in any field. This forces these communities into a ‘fossil fuel trap,’ where they are stuck because there is no innovation in technology advancement and no investment in education, and they end up creating more greenhouse gas emissions than if they never used natural gas in the first place.
In the short run, the shale gas revolution led to an 11.2% decline in the CO2 intensity of US electricity production and reduced emissions levels by about 4.2%. However, in the long term, electricity sector emissions start rising and are about 25% higher as a result of the boom.
Water Scarcity
Each well needs about 6 million gallons of pressurized water. According to a 2011 EPA study, approximately 35,000 fractured wells across the U.S. required an estimated 70 to 140 billion gallons of water each year, which is equivalent to the total amount of water used annually to support 40 to 80 cities with a population of 50,000 or about 1 to 2 cities of 2.5 million people. Depending on where the fracking is located, different types of environmental issues are created. On the east coast, this causes more shoreline erosion and damages. On the west coast, this exacerbates already low groundwater supplies, which are continuing to worsen due to climate change. In either case, this results in less water available for other activities, such as irrigation for agriculture or cooling data centers. With projected temperature rises due to climate change, water scarcity remains a growing concern. Moreover, decreased water availability can feedback to impact oil and gas production, oil refining, and fuel transport, creating energy dependence issues. In PA, the wells need even more water than the average; they use 11.4 million gallons per well, causing damages of $200 million over time.
Habitat, Biodiversity, & Ecosystem Disruption
As we discussed before, acres of forests and agricultural land must be cleared to promote fracking development. This leads to forest fragmentation, destroying habitats and making it harder for wildlife to survive. Other ecosystem services disrupted include biodiversity and preserving the air and water cycle, which are of particular importance when the air and water quality are being damaged. While wells are functioning, habitat at these sites may be completely eliminated. After a well site is no longer active, it is expected to be remediated and returned to its pre-drilling state; however, this could take many years for forests to regrow and for soil quality to go back to pre-fracking levels. This loss in ecosystem value results in a loss of $100 million for communities in PA.
Infrastructure
Fracking requires a lot of new infrastructure to be built such as pipelines and roads to transport all materials. As long as fracking is occurring, these materials are in use, however once fracking ends these materials are no longer needed. The main issue is the long lasting damage done to the infrastructure in the community that fracking occurs.
Roads
To transport natural gas, 1,200 loaded trucks are needed to bring one gas well into production. These trucks are very heavy and the equivalent of 8 million cars. For rural communities, whose roads are designed for a much smaller subset of people, this creates a lot of damage for infrastructure and human life. In PA, for the 2,028 wells that were permitted to be drilled in 2017, the estimated average value of road wear and tear is estimated as $11 million per year.
Housing
As a boom occurs, housing can increase in price from 200-300% in the short term. This puts a strain on the minority and low-income residents. For the new people moving into the town who are getting paid upwards of $100,000 per year, this is no problem for them to pay the increase in rent. However, when the average pay for other workers in the city is only $50,000 per year, this creates a big financial constraint on these families who now find it much more difficult to pay rent.
Once drilling is finished, prices fall by 20-30% of the original listed housing price. While this may seem like a positive, these housing prices are decreasing because no one wants to purchase these houses because of fears of water safety and not wanting to live near an “unaesthetic” place. In total, this has cost $2.5 billion to PA residents in declining home values.
Conclusion
As a culmination of all these effects, fracking makes communities less resilient to future changes, especially given the finite nature of natural gas reserves. Fewer individuals are graduating and pursuing higher education, and decreased tax revenues are allocated to education. These factors result in an overall decline in long-run innovation, knowledge, and economic growth. Investments are not being directed toward sectors that could foster long-term community success, such as tourism, agriculture, forestry, green energy, entrepreneurship, or education. In the meantime, current fracking practices are destroying and degrading resources that previously sustained these communities. Farmers, for example, find it impossible to return to farming their land, as agricultural productivity is diminished or halted, and it takes many years to restore soil quality, forests, and biodiversity.
In addition, the brunt of the negative effects occurs in these shale communities, creating a situation of environmental injustice. While shale producers reap only positive effects in the form of increased profits, local community members experience a net negative impact in both the short and long term. These are the people who are being preyed upon with the promise of community benefits, but it all ends in exploitation, as only a small number of jobs are created, tax revenues do not go back into helping these communities, and they are left with the long-run effects of destroyed health, education systems, ecosystems, and infrastructure. Other nearby communities benefit more than the community where fracking occurs, as people commute daily to fracking jobs but are shielded from the environmental issues, such as air and water quality problems. This dynamic is captured in the figure below: globally there are economic benefits from fracking in both the short and long run, but within shale communities, the most significant economic, health, environmental and infrastructure effects are negative in both the short and long run. The second figure shows that benefits from fracking are limited in local shale communities and grow in nearby communities that receive the local spill overs, thus underscoring a pattern of environmental injustice, with the most harm accruing to the communities closest to the fracking sites and the more distant communities benefiting the most from local spill overs.
In conclusion, this analysis of fracking's multifaceted impacts in Pennsylvania reveals a stark contrast between industry promises and the lived realities of affected communities. While natural gas extraction may offer some short-term economic boosts and broader benefits like lower energy prices, these gains are ultimately overshadowed by long-term environmental degradation, health crises, and socio-economic disparities. To ensure equitable and sustainable development, it is crucial for communities to move beyond simplistic narratives and embrace holistic sustainability assessments that account for the full spectrum of costs and benefits – economic, environmental, social, and health – before committing to resource extraction projects like fracking. Only through such comprehensive evaluations can communities make informed decisions that truly promote long-term well-being for all residents, safeguarding both the environment and future generations.
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