Marcellus’ power is real

The (Pittsburgh) Tribune-Review: Impressive as they are, statistics tell only part of the positive economic story of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale natural-gas industry. The stories of entrepreneurs who depend on and partner with the industry to succeed tell the rest.

Former miner Frank Puskarich, 61, has seen his Hog Father’s Old Fashioned BBQ boom along with gas production, drawing about 40 percent of his business from the oil and gas industry. Since opening in Washington, Pa., in 2007, sales and employment have risen eightfold. He now has five restaurants plus four trailers delivering meals to well pads and fracking sites. “One business feeds off another business,” says Mr. Puskarich, who spends $2.5 million annually with food suppliers.

Hog Father’s embodies the shale gas industry’s difficult-to-quantify but undoubtedly huge “multiplier effect.” And that only makes more striking such statewide industry benefits as the 243,000 jobs it supported in 2014, $1.2 billion in 2012 royalty payments to landowners, $2.3 billion in state tax revenue since 2008 and more than $850 million in state impact fees since 2011, according to the Marcellus Shale Coalition.