Pennsylvania's fracking industry plans to continue, whoever wins White House

CANONSBURG (United States), Sept 15 (AFP): Pennsylvanians working in the controversial fracking industry are confident that the sector will endure, whoever wins the White House in November's presidential election.
With an eye firmly on winning over voters in the gas-rich battleground state, both Republican candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris are vowing to support the hydraulic fracturing industry.
But Trump's consistently strong support for the practice - and Harris's past opposition to it - have led some voters in the largely rural Republican county of Washington to conclude that the former president would be better.
"I absolutely adore Trump, but I think he's very contentious," said Jennifer McIntyre, a 47-year-old sales and operations representative for Keystone Clearwater Solutions, which provides water transfer services for the fracking industry.
McIntyre, who is active in the local Washington County Republican party, told AFP she thinks the former president is "incredibly pro-oil and gas," and that Democrats at both the state and national level have put up regulations that make it harder for the industry to succeed.
"I think that sometimes those regulations are not necessarily appropriate," said McIntyre, 47, in an interview at the company's offices in the suburban business park of Southpointe, where many fracking businesses are located.
Pennsylvania's embrace of new fracking and drilling techniques in the first decade of the 21st century kicked off a boom in natural gas extraction which has pushed the state's annual production higher than Canada or Qatar.
There are currently more than 2,000 active so-called "unconventional" gas wells in Washington County, and close to 13,000 across the state, according to data from Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection.
At Diversified Energy's site in South Franklin Township in southwestern Pennsylvania, seven 10-year-old wells hum quietly as they extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale thousands of feet below. The gas is first cleaned, and then sold into a nearby pipeline, generating profits for Diversified, royalties for landowners, and revenues for state and local government.