Pa. lawmakers scramble to finish gas-drilling bill

Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa.

State senators are scrambling to bridge a partisan divide and wrap up months of negotiations on a sweeping bill that would toughen outdated environmental regulations and impose a drilling fee on Pennsylvania’s booming natural-gas industry, senators said Friday.

If all goes according to plan, the closed-door talks would yield an agreement this weekend on a bill that would run dozens of pages long, if not more than 100, in time to write it and amend it into an underlying bill on Monday. A final Senate vote would follow Tuesday.

“It is a challenging process, but I think we’ve covered a lot of ground and are really building toward a comprehensive, bipartisan piece of legislation that can garner the necessary votes,” said one negotiator, Sen. John Yudichak, D-Luzerne.

Drilling companies began flocking to Pennsylvania in earnest in 2008 to exploit the gas in the Marcellus Shale formation, the nation’s largest-known natural-gas formation. But the drilling companies were largely working under laws from the 1980s that never envisioned the deep-drilling activity and the high-volume hydraulic fracturing that produces millions of gallons of often toxic wastewater.

So far, the Legislature has done little to update those laws, leaving it largely to the Department of Environmental Protection to make changes by regulation. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania remains the largest gas-drilling state without any kind of tax on the activity, despite efforts by Democrats to press it.

On Friday, Yudichak did not want to reveal details of the emerging legislation or the talks to finalize it. In general, it will seek to toughen clean water-protection laws and penalties for environmental violations, impose an impact fee on the wells and distribute the money from the fee.

If the bill does not pass the Senate next week, it would likely have to wait until senators return to session in Harrisburg during the week of Nov. 14.

It is likely that parts of the developing Senate bill will run into opposition from the House and from Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who is viewed as an industry ally.