Pennsylvania Utility Commission: 2023 Natural Gas Impact Fees Top $278 Million

Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission announced this week that the commonwealth and its localities will collect nearly $279 million from natural gas extraction impact fees this year. 

The revenues, applying to drilling activity throughout 2022, bring the total fees collected for gas extraction from the Marcellus Shale sedimentary rock formation to $2.5 billion since 2012, the year lawmakers imposed the tax on fossil-fuel producers. This year’s allocations will be the largest yearly amount the government amassed through the levy, representing a 19 percent increase over the prior year’s take. 

Read More

Pennsylvania Localities Benefitting Substantially from Gas Extraction Fee

While Democrats insist Pennsylvania misses out on revenue from natural gas extraction, a Pittsburgh nonprofit’s analysis published on Thursday observes drilling impact fees yielded $2.25 billion through 2021.

Since the boom in hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), the horizontal drilling technique gas companies use to access the vast reserves of fossil fuel from the Marcellus Shale sedimentary rock formation, many politicians have eyed an extraction tax. Instead of such a tax, former Governor Tom Corbett (R) and a Republican-led legislature levied an impact fee in 2012, with revenues going to localities largely to mitigate fracking-related environmental disruption. In the new policy brief from the Allegheny Institute (AI), the think tank’s executive director Frank Gamrat detailed those revenue gains. 

Read More

Policy Constraints Force Electric Bills Up in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvanians’ electric bills rose by an average of nearly three-quarters over the last two years and policymakers have only made the problem worse, according to the Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation (CF). 

State residents served by Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL) have seen their rates go up by just over half since December 2020. Customers of the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) have meanwhile experienced a doubling of their power costs during that time. All other providers have also risen their rates considerably. 

Read More

Proposal Would Bar Pennsylvania Counties That Ban Gas Drilling from Getting Gas Revenues

Pennsylvania state Sen. Gen Yaw (R-Williamsport) this week announced he is authoring a bill to bar any county that bans natural-gas development on county-owned lands from getting certain natural-gas revenues. 

Specifically, Yaw’s proposal would prevent those jurisdictions from receiving allocations from the commonwealth’s gas-drilling impact fee, including any grants from the Marcellus Legacy Fund that finances regional environmental improvement projects. Revenues collected from the levy on companies extracting gas from the sedimentary rock known as Marcellus Shale totaled $234.4 million last year. The fee has brought nearly $2.3 billion into the state Treasury over the last decade.

Read More