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Thousands of jobs on horizon
(by Dave Lange - August 17, 2011)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Thousands of jobs on horizon
Count me among the diminishing numbers who believe that job creation remains the highest priority for our country in these tough times.
So when Gov. John Kasich asked recently, "Did you hear about the revolution that's come to Ohio?" my ears were perked. "Folks," he said, "this is huge." He referred to the announcement by Chesapeake Energy that there could be $15 billion to $20 billion worth of oil and gas buried in the Utica shale below the 1.25 million acres for which the Oklahoma-based company holds leasing rights in Eastern Ohio.
That could mean thousands of jobs to this employment-deprived state, we were told, although how many thousands was a question floating on air rather than grounded in actual numbers.
While the ingenuity of private enterprise and the pursuit of royalties by landowners certainly would deserve credit for producing those anticipated jobs, I prefer to credit God, or Mother Nature, or even geology, depending on your point of view, for actually creating them.
Of course, there are the usual party poopers who wish this blessing from the heavens above or the depths below would just go away. Some people don't trust big corporations, including oil companies, unless they can create a conglomeration of government regulation to stand in the way.
Not to compare Chesapeake Energy with Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum and Conoco, but, if you can't trust the big five oil companies that spent $75 million on lobbying in the first half of 2011, who can you trust?
Residents in Geauga County, where oil and gas drilling has spread like explosive methane gas did through the aquifer in Bainbridge in December 2007, have been calling on the government to step in.
However, it is their state government that colluded with the drilling industry to gut local drilling regulations by passing Ohio House Bill 278 in 2004. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which is entrusted with ensuring citizens' safety but didn't prevent one Bainbridge home from blowing up and dozens of wells from being contaminated, is equally reassuring that hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," 5,000 feet deep and then 5,000 feet horizontally to extract the newfound treasure is perfectly safe.
Nevertheless, if thousands of jobs could be added in Ohio with this $15 billion to $20 billion black-gold mine, a certain amount of risk must be expected -- both on the part of the industry, which has invested so much money it in, and on the part of homeowners and farmers, who have invested so little.
Just for the sake of proportion, BP Oil estimates the cost of cleaning up its 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon spill at $40 billion, only twice as much as Eastern Ohio's Utica shale deposits supposedly are worth in total. Goldman Sachs estimated the Gulf cleanup at $200 billion, 10 times the value of the governor's "huge" revelation, but what do they know?
BP's losses in the wake of its Deepwater Horizon disaster last year totaled $17.2 billion. But the big five oil companies, including BP, earned $36 billion in profits over the past quarter. Quite possibly, Chesapeake Energy will be drilling a bit longer than three months to tap into that $20 billion Ohio "revolution."
But with only 5.1 million Ohioans working and 517,000 unemployed in the state, those untold thousands of jobs are nothing to sneeze at.
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