Washington Times:
Paul Battista opened his industrial supply store in this small town southwest of Pittsburgh 31 years ago in the hopes of doing big business with the infant solar-power industry. He called his store Sunnyside Supply as a nod to what he viewed at the time as the future of American energy.
Times have changed — and so has his customer base.
Sunnyside’s recent profits are through the roof, up more than 200 percent in the past three years. Mr. Battista’s workforce has tripled since 2008, from five to 15 employees. Solar power wasn’t the economic savior, however. Instead, the booming Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling industry gave the small-town businessman the means to build a bigger, better store and invest in new trucks to transport goods to gas companies drilling across western Pennsylvania.
“We’re modeling our business to what they need,” Mr. Battista said of his approach, which often involves nighttime trips across the state to fetch rare parts.
Sunnyside Supply’s success is just one side effect of the gas industry’s mad rush for Pennsylvania, one of the richest parts of the Marcellus Shale, a mammoth chunk of marine sedimentary rock stretching from New York as far south as Kentucky. Analysts say “the Shale” holds as much as 516 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to supply America’s demand for a century or more.
A method called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the key to harvesting the bountiful supply thousands of feet below ground. Millions of gallons of water are mixed with sand and chemicals and pumped into the ground, cracking open the rock and liberating the gas so it can be pumped to waiting pipelines.
The cutting-edge technology is revolutionizing the energy industry, changing the economic landscape across the state and giving new life to communities that were struggling to make ends meet.
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It is too bad places like New York are not smart enough to take advantage of the gas fields that lie beneath them. Instead New York is running people out of the sate with high taxes and few jobs. The energy industry has the potential to create thousands of new jobs and increase revenue to the treasury if the Democrats would quit trying to strangle domestic production. The spin off of those new jobs is increased economic activity in entire communities.
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