States and localities fighting over hydrofracturing drilling

WSJ story about states pushing for fracking while localities fight them over noise and infrastructure that comes with it (want to police it more vigorously).  State lawmakers are enacting laws that restrict the rights of cities and counties to regulate these things and that's creating some genuine local resistance.  The states are seeing dollar signs in terms of tax revenue and are running a bit roughshod.

So we're starting - as usual - to see this fought out in courts (ex: seven PA towns suing the state over desire to use local zoning laws to regulate things; drilling company in NY appealing state court rulings that say towns can use zoning laws to ban fracking).  All sides naturally cite the "special interests" of their opponents.

Point being, the court fights are just beginning, introducing a certain regulatory uncertainty to the whole package. This was a prominent feature of one of the more negative scenarios we explored in Wikistrat's recent "North American Energy Export Boom" simulation.

Comments

[Michael]

Not a subscriber, so I couldn't read the whole article: do they mention the groundwater issues?