Local representatives and Trump administration reopen fracking conversation for Delaware River Basin

This article originally appeared in The River Reporter.

Local representatives and members of the Trump administration discussed ways on Sunday to fight the ban on fracking in the Delaware River Basin in order to return drilling rights to property owners in Wayne and Pike Counties and to help make Northeastern Pennsylvania the artificial intelligence capital of the world. 

Representative Rob Bresnahan, the newly-elected congressman for Pennsylvania’s 8th district, convened a roundtable on Sunday with local pro-fracking industry figures, advocates and elected officials. Together with Lee Zeldin, the newly appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they talked about the need to unleash the natural gas resources in the Delaware River Basin and throughout the country. 

Fracking, a process of fracturing rock to extract oil or natural gas from beneath the earth’s surface, is currently prohibited in Wayne and Pike Counties as well as in neighboring Sullivan County, N.Y., and the rest of the lands within the Delaware River watershed. (Fracking is also banned separately throughout New York State by the New York State government.)

The Delaware River Basin Commission, an interstate body charged with protecting the Delaware River, placed a moratorium on fracking in 2010, and banned it permanently in 2021. 

The resolution banning fracking cited “scientific and technical literature… conclusions of other government agencies” and “more than a decade of experience with high volume hydraulic fracturing in regions outside the Delaware River Basin” to decide that allowing fracking would “pose significant, immediate and long-term risks to the development, conservation, utilization, management and preservation of the water resources” of the Delaware River.

Elected officials and property owners in the Wayne and Pike area have fought the moratorium—then the ban—since the beginning, so far without success. 

Fracking supporters see the DRBC’s ban as “overreach” and as the “taking of property rights,” Senator Lisa Baker (R-Wayne/Pike) told the roundtable. 

“We have been fighting through the legislative process, through the courts and other [methods],” Baker said. “And we see such a tremendous unfairness to the landowners here who have been harmed.”

Representative Jonathan Fritz (R-Wayne) agreed. “We have tried six ways from Sunday, legislatively and legally, to correct this wrong,” he said. 

Fracking boon

Supporters of fracking see it as unfair that landowners in Wayne and Pike Counties have been left behind as drilling has taken off elsewhere in Pennsylvania. 

Pennsylvania has three river basins—the Delaware, the Susquehanna and the Ohio—that currently operate under contrasting rules for fracking, Fritz said. “So I’m saying yes to drilling in two of these, but the third—the Delaware River Basin—we’re saying no.”

“This speaks to this fundamental unfairness,” Fritz said. “If it’s safe enough to be done in two river basins, why not in the third? It deprives people of their property rights, and speaks glaringly of hypocrisy.”

This difference in regulations creates a difference in economic outcomes among Wayne and Pike Counties and the rest of the state. Curt Coccodrilli, former state director of USDA rural development, called it “an economic Iron Curtain, almost 52 miles inside of Pennsylvania.”

Wayne County Commissioner Brian Smith spoke to the difference in finances from Wayne County, where drilling is prohibited, to its free-to-frack neighbors. 

Susquehanna County Commissioner Alan Hall took representatives from Wayne to see Susquehanna’s new, $21 million emergency 911 center, Smith told the roundtable. “Nobody gave him a hard time about building it, because they had gas drilling dollars that they could build that 911 center. If we tried to build a building in Wayne County that was that expensive, the taxpayers would be all over us, because we don’t have gas drilling dollars to put toward something like this.”

“Brian, I think you make a great point,” Bresnahan said. He said that, in preparing for the roundtable, he had reviewed a 2019 study that projected the potential economic impact of fracking in Northeast PA would be close to one billion dollars. 

“You’re talking about ways that we could fund schools and parks and pave roads and critical infrastructure systems,” Bresnahan said. “This would be an incredible opportunity to do that.”

A friend of fracking

It’s unclear what actions the federal government could take to try and overturn the DRBC’s fracking ban. The DRBC is an interstate commission, with each of the states bordering the Delaware River as well as the federal government having an equal vote, not a federal agency. 

Asked if there’s a commitment from the Trump administration to try and open up drilling in Northeast Pennsylvania, Zeldin said that “President Trump is someone I feel confident we can approach [with] any good idea [and] his response is going to be that he wants to get it done as quickly as possible.” If there’s a “specific localized ask for this area,” members of the administration could “add a little bit of muscle behind” the local support in approaching the president, he said.

The Trump administration has made clear its commitment to rolling back environmental regulations in favor of growing the energy industry. 

“The president will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals,” reads an item on the whitehouse.gov list of issues for the Trump administration. 

In simpler terms—as Trump put it on the campaign trail—”Drill, baby, drill.”

“President Trump heard loud and clear from the American people last November that they had some concerns they felt were being left behind on, one of which being a desire to unleash energy dominance,” Zeldin said. 

Prior to being named as the head of the EPA, Zeldin ran for governor of New York. While on the campaign trail, he called for the state to lift its wholesale ban on fracking.  The difference between New York and Pennsylvania is a frequent topic of conversation at the federal level, Zeldin told the March 2 roundtable. 

“A lot of people on the other side of the state border are looking over into Pennsylvania, and President Trump talks about this all the time. I’ve been in this position now for, I don’t know, four or five weeks? I’ve heard President Trump talk about what we’re talking about right now, and the dynamic of what we’re seeing in Pennsylvania and what we see on the New York side, I’ve probably heard him bring it up six, seven, eight times. I’m happy that you have some tapping into it, but I really think that our country needs to be smarter and tap into it more,” he said. 

Zeldin said as well that opening up fracking and growing natural energy generation could support a growing artificial intelligence industry in Pennsylvania. 

“President Trump wants to make America the AI capital of the world,” said Zeldin. “Why can’t Pennsylvania become the AI capital of America? That’s something that I’m hearing from people here in Pennsylvania, in Northeast PA, where land is cheaper and energy policy is smarter than your neighbors just across the border.”