Today, this column is all about energy and its importance to this state and nation.
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of what happened in the N.C. Legislature this past week. On Friday, the N.C. House convincingly passed its version of Senate Bill 76, which lifts the moratorium on drilling for natural gas in this state. The legislation will now be sent to the governor and signed into law!
Folks, this is probably the best and most important economic news that we have had in our state in the past century. I had the opportunity to have a rather lengthy conversation with N.C. Rep. John Bell shortly after this legislation had passed on Friday and he said we could start issuing “fracking” permits to drilling companies within a year from now. He further stated the Department of Environment and Natural Resources will probably finalize rules and regulations for this practice as early as October of next year.
Fracking involves, as I pointed out in a column in April, drilling a well thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface and blasting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals into the well to create fractures in shale rock formations to release the natural gas trapped inside. N.C. Sen. Louis Pate pointed out we now have the opportunity to literally turn our state’s economy around by releasing the vast amounts of gas believed trapped below North Carolina’s soil. N.C. Sen. Buck Newton said we would be setting severance taxes on this gas lower than any other state, thus attracting industry and putting thousands of people back to work!
To state another bit of encouraging news, once-impoverished Karnes County in Texas, by doing what we are now about to do, has been turned into a gold mine, with landowners there pulling in $70 million in royalties in one month alone, and in North Dakota, as I mentioned previously, that state’s unemployment rate has dropped to 2.6 percent. There may soon be no sales or state income tax there, largely due to this effort.
When confronted with the comment from an opponent of this legislation that we don’t want wells becoming long-term storage facilities, Sen. Newton responded, “The safest way to dispose of this wastewater is to put it back down deep in the earth, and there are more than 170,000 such wells in the U.S. already with no problems.”
And keep this in mind: In this legislation, drillers have a lot at stake if fracking happened to prove uneconomical or unsafe. They are required to post three types of bonds before drilling in our state — one, ensuring they have sufficient funds to complete a project and not abandon it midway; two, providing cleanup funds to the state in case of an accident; and three, compensating a landowner in case drilling damages his property. What a great day this is for North Carolina!
And if this isn’t enough good news about our economic future, there are now hopeful signs on the national front that the Keystone Pipeline may at last be approved by the Obama administration, perhaps within three months from now. A May 29 editorial in The Free Press pointed out that this would bring hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Alberta, Canada, into the U.S. every day, creating good-paying jobs and decreasing dependence on oil from the turbulent Middle East.
The 830,000 barrels of oil per day expected from Keystone is fully half of the oil the U.S. now imports from the Middle East. As the editorial revealed, the pipeline has bipartisan support, with 17 Democrats in the Senate joining with the GOP to approve an amendment to support the Keystone pipeline.
Given the ample time for review of this important pipeline, and given a recent environmental draft by the U.S. State Department that found no significant threat to the environment, the White House needs to approve this pipeline now!
We hope this happens, but even if it doesn’t, North Carolina, with its dramatic action this past Friday, has moved our state to the forefront in the move toward energy independence.
In future columns, we will discuss other important legislation in the N.C. House, such as: background checks for welfare, a major immigration bill, Voter ID, the School Safety Bill and the rollback of environmental regulations. Stay with us!
Reece Gardner is the host of “The Reece Gardner Hour,” which airs on TACC-9 on Mondays at 9 p.m., Tuesdays at 8 p.m., Thursdays at 11 p.m., Sundays at 10:30 p.m.and on-demand anytime at TACC9.com. You can reach Reece at rbgej@aol.com.