Drilling for shale gas saved Pittsburgh after years of neglect, abandoned coal mines and empty mills and it could do the same for the UK
$160billion is being invested in fracking in the States, creating 100,000s of jobs and reviving abandoned mining towns
WHEN filmmakers needed somewhere to base their vision of a post-apocalyptic America, Pittsburgh got the starring role.
Abandoned coal mines, empty steel mills, a derelict city block and deserted amusement park meant a ready-made backdrop for 2009 movie The Road.
The city is the heart of the “Rust Belt”, the term given to the north east corner of the US that suffered the brunt of industrial decline.
Actor Viggo Mortensen said during filming there nine years ago: “It’s tangible, the misery and the hopelessness and the bleakness.”
Today, Pittsburgh is booming again, with hotels, restaurants, hi-tech colleges and offices springing up and regeneration of its riverfront nearly complete.
The reason? Shale gas. Unlike in the UK, where the Government has let environmentalists hijack the debate over the “fracking” process used to extract shale, the US is exploiting this resource and reaping the benefits.
So successful is fracking in the US that the gas produced is being sold overseas, including to Britain, where our trillions of cubic metres of the stuff lie untapped.
The first ship carrying 27,500 cubic metres of US ethane, imported by British chemical giant INEOS, is nearing Grangemouth, East Stirlingshire.
The same company expects to apply for planning permission to bore the first test wells of its own into shale deposits below the East Midlands by the end of this year.
It has promised to hand over six per cent of revenues from future shale gas wells to local communities, an estimated windfall of up to £2.5billion.
INEOS invited The Sun to witness its operations in the US first hand and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, retired blast furnace construction worker Paul Kwiatek knows the benefits it could have for Britain.
He said: “When the steel plants first closed people here thought they would be laid off for a while and would then go back to work, but they never did.
“In the last ten years we’ve had the shale gas and lots of new technology firms coming in. I guess money attracts money.”
Standing outside Chuck’s Tavern in the suburban township of Imperial, Paul regularly sees construction lorries.
He said: “They’re going to build a new gas cracker plant near here, which will be a whole new boom for this area.
"There will be a lot of jobs and travelling workers coming in. We’ll see a new influx of money.”
Just up the road from Imperial, the latest six-well natural gas production site was opened in July on the edge of Pittsburgh airport by former coal-mining company Consol Energy,
It harvests enough gas each day from the fracked rock to power 100,000 homes.
Some of that gas could be coming across the Atlantic to Britain in the three-weekly shipments, as the energy companies look for new customers.
Gas from wells in the Rust Belt has helped cut local electricity and heating bills by half since 2008.
Landowners with wells on their property cash in separately on their mineral rights.
Fifty miles west, The Sun visited a 145ft drilling rig boring the next well 10,000ft into the shale rock layer.
Rig 803 stands out above the tree-lined slopes of Switzerland, Ohio — population 600 — where it is more than two weeks into a four-month well-drilling process.
Then the rig will be dismantled and the frackers will move in for a month and a half to pump water and sand at high pressure into the shale rock to fracture it and release the precious methane, ethane and other gases.
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Down the hill at Lake View Farm, 78-year-old Sandy Dietlich and her husband Paul, 80, a farmer, admitted they had not known what to expect before the work started.
Paul also drives the school bus but has no fear of running up against construction lorries because, by agreement, they are banned from roads around the times of the school run.
After just six months of work, the rig and frackers will have gone.
A tennis court-sized production site will be all that is left, with electronically controlled well-heads silently harvesting the gas and spiriting it away down pipelines.
Sandy said: “We have two or three pipelines going across our land so the property has been leased already and now we are receiving the royalties.
“There used to be coal mined beneath our property, but no more. There has been very high unemployment here and although a lot of the drilling work is carried out by experts from out of the area, there is definitely work for local people.”
In Britain, INEOS has licences to explore more than a million acres of land in the East Midlands, North West, North Yorkshire and Scotland.
But around half of that land will never see any drilling because it is protected and Scotland currently has a moratorium on shale gas exploration.
INEOS hopes to make planning applications by the end of 2016 for five test wells in the East Midlands.
And by this time next year the company intends to have made 30 applications across all its licence areas.
It will use the imported gas as a raw material for its plastics and chemical plants and for fuel.
Shale operations director Tom Pickering said: “The Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering have concluded shale gas can be extracted safely when operations are conducted properly and with appropriate regulation.
“Where there have been instances in the US of environmental damage, this has been caused by poor operational practice and inadequate regulation, rather than the fracking process itself.
“We will learn from the poor early practices in the US.”
Back in Pittsburgh, Senator Camera Bartolotta told The Sun: “Visit the gas production sites when the drilling process is over and the fracking has been done and you’ll see the birds are not falling out of the sky and the dogs and cats are not running crazy.
“It is clean and quiet. There is grass everywhere. These are farmers’ fields where they produce crops or tend herds which graze next to compressors.”
The impact of the natural gas industry on communities in South West Pennsylvania has been huge. At its zenith a few years ago it employed 330,000 people in well-paid jobs.
Next to Chuck’s Tavern in Imperial, Kelly Cole, owner of Cole’s Pub said: “You see old farmhouses with new machinery in the barns, newly fenced yards and new roofs on the houses.
“Couples who went out once a week to eat before are going out two or three times a week now. The whole economy is better.”
