Vice President Kamala Harris stated with conviction at Tuesday’s debate she has no intention of banning hydraulic fracturing: “I will not ban fracking, I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States.”
But natural-gas workers in western Pennsylvania simply don’t believe the woman who said running for president in 2020, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
The motive for the Democratic nominee’s fracking flip-flop is clear — the practice is an economic boon for Pennsylvania, a must-win state this election.
The Keystone State’s natural-gas sector supports around 123,000 jobs and was responsible for more than $41 billion in 2022 economic activity, per the energy economists at FTI Consulting, Inc.
Scott Ivey, 49, a service supervisor for Stingray Pressure Pumping who’s worked throughout Pennsylvania, said he and his fellow “roughnecks” are a vital part of western Pennsylvania’s economy.
“it’s a tremendous surge of money,” Ivey told The Post. “You think about when I stay at a hotel. Three-quarters of people that are staying at the hotel at that time are working in the oil and gas industry. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to book hotels because they’re so full up.”
Sarah Phillips, a Canonsburg, Pa., petroleum engineer and Gladiator Energy saleswoman, agreed the industry’s helped her town just outside Pittsburgh that used to be a coal district.
“It was desolate just a decade ago. And now it’s this huge, thriving area with restaurants, hotels, bowling alleys — like anything that you can possibly think of.”
Ryan Butya, the owner of Canonsburg’s All Star Sports Bar & Grill, said the vast majority of his customers are roughnecks spending their hard-earned money unwinding after a long day on the rigs.
“Probably like 85%,” he told The Post. “It is a crazy number actually. We’re based around three hotels that are within walking distance of us.”
Butya, whose father opened the bar in 2014 after an influx of business from fracking, gushed about how the industry has brought wealth and commerce to the community.
“A lot of these people, they make a good living. They can raise a family, have fun on the weekends with the salary. Look at all the tax revenue that it generates.”
But those who’ve built careers and families off the rise of fracking don’t trust Kamala Harris to hold true to her promise not to ban it.
“I don’t believe anything Kamala Harris says,” said Ivey. “I don’t want to get too political, but I believe she’ll regulate it so hard that it’ll be impossible to frack once she gets in.”
Ivey bases his opinion on what he’s seen first hand under three presidential administrations in his12-year career in the natural-gas industry.
Since President “Biden won, all the jobs have seemed to slow down. They’ve all moved in a green direction, like electric fleets and whatnot, which only certain people have.”
He’s grateful for the benefits a natural-gas career has brought him — and pessimistic about what regulation has wrought on the industry.
“There’s not a lot of people working,” he said. “And that’s due to — I ain’t gonna blame it just on Joe Biden, but it is what it is. They don’t shut it down, they just regulate it and make it hard for everybody to work.”
Sarah Phillips noted the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s construction lagged on for years, costing billions of dollars, after environmental groups including the Wilderness Society and Appalachian Voices sued seeking to block it.
“And that was due to kickback from the Biden and Harris administration. We had federal leasing bans. We had [liquified-natural-gas] prohibitions, power-plant shutdowns, EV mandates,” she said.
Democrats “want net-zero [carbon] by 2050, which inherently is anti-fracking.”
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