how far would you go to help someone would you go to the end of your driveway to a place six thousand miles from home write a script the chances are good that you could have another one but it doesn't have to have you could be a stroke smart star i'm even healthy and i'm exercising again i'm keeping my blood pressure and cholesterol levels under control after thirty five congress and the populace are talking about for hours and hours every day on the next subject we're only discussing is the marcellus shale something that is very important to us in southwest pennsylvania especially but in peter's time because negotiations going on with a lot of the residents and the homeowners association as well as our township to do drilling not necessarily in the township but to at least give up the rights that in fact are underneath the surface  congressman you are on a committee that deals a lot with this i'm going to just turn it over to you for a while and then i'll start asking you questions as we go along with natural gas we are sitting on goal here and lots of it the marcellus shale play which runs through new york pennsylvania ohio western new maryland massive amounts of natural gas clean burning energy course we're also on massive amounts of coal we have our waterways and we have westinghouse nuclear and so we are really the hub of energy in america that's great we can create lots of jobs that's good but in the process of doing all that we have to make sure that environmental protections remain strong as chairman of the natural gas caucus we have three parts of our mission statement one is responsible exploration a safe transmission from point to point in three years expanded use in manufacturing so the prices of natural gas don't have a roller coaster effect but stays stable over time so companies can move forward and predict their their growth  problems come when companies like dow chemical shuts down its factories united states lays off many workers and spends over twenty billion dollars building factories in the mideast for natural gas a stable and cheaper but what are the concerns of first part of the environmental some of list the specific amounts of each one the recipe is still held proprietary by the companies they say it's like coke and pepsi you know what's in it but you don't know how much of each is in it and they the companies that provide those fracking fluids want to me taking that because they feel one is more competitive edge than the other but as they go through some people raise questions does it damage the drinking water well couple things one most part people don't drink well water around here they have city water second thing is when it is drilled the water table may be anywhere from a few feet a few hundred feet down but the fracking process the marcellus shale is several thousand feet down six or seven thousand feet and then it sends out hor few thousand feet in each direction in that it's pump that the chemicals ninety five percent water and sand the fracture of the shale pump the sand there and let the natural gas come through the water has to be taken out and is to process it's not allowed to be dumped me put in a stream that's all illegal and anybody who is doing that i want to know about it because this is something we want to make sure we're enforcing but what's happening now is the companies are doing a number of things one onsite temporary facilities to treat the water or to recycle the water some companies are going to go to a hundred percent recycling none that what is going to go to where else but to some treatment of it to clean up what's the chemical levels and reuse it and some are using it in larger water treatment facilities which they're building community like large sewer treatment plants benefit the community to get a plant in the run pipelines to that but throughout all this very carefully monitoring it as i said i want to know if anybody is violating any of the rules in that because we're not going to tolerate that but so i want to also make sure that we have the benefits of what this is going to do for our economy a couple hundred thousand jobs we've already forty fifty thousand jobs in this a lot of companies have emerged growing there to be more this taking place as more people are trained to work on these things from cypress peroration of pride playing to crane operation to well tenders and over time some of our workers will be trained to of how to be those roughnecks and how to be those guys who actually do the drilling right now it's a very specialized skill people coming in from other states to do it but we want to see pennsylvania's trying to do that as we follow through well a lot of the questions that i have the indices say or come from a military background in chemical nuclear biological one of the things pennsylvania has been sitting on great on for years we've been you know when you sell  home you have to get a rate on test usually and depending upon results of that you may have to add a fan system to your property were digging down thousands of feet of where radon comes from were the words that were pulling this stuff up or putting it into the water we're putting it in back into the water after it gets cleaned if they don't reuse it has to go somewhere all right my concern and says and concern of many people right now are what happens you know there is no device according to some people in pennsylvania no no plant in pennsylvania  has the facilities to clean that kind of contamination how do we as property owners you know if i'm sitting on a track of property and i don't want to go with this but my neighbor does all right whatever they're drilling on their property the process and i had the opportunity to have washing commissioner bracken burns here the other day and he discussed this with us at length and saying that you know how the process is set up have found out in the gulf that just because of the process is set up to work properly doesn't mean it always happens that way and there's accidents do happen and the hickory area for example a lot of these wells have been drilled a lot of people are complaining that because they do have water and they do have some of the homes up in there have been told not to drink not to bathe not to cook and not to do anything with their water when you're used to turning on your tap and now you can't touch it that causes me concern you know pennsylvania for a period of time would not let the conservation district go into these areas that causes me concern if i'm a homeowner and if i have twenty acres and i wanted to make a lake the gratian district the standing there watching me do it making sure that it's done properly not affecting anything but there seems to be some areas with not only pennsylvania but with the e p a that are sort of looking the other way or the clean water act i understand did not include this fracking process it was exempted from what i understand but i think that i mean i know the d p i don't think they're looking at the way but i think they're looking at some of these things very closely because when they see that there's a case of someone has spilled some of this water that it's untreated one of the praetor pump or partially treated water they have to clean up and mitigate that circumstance and they levy fines or stop the company from doing it i don't think we should go all the way a full state moratorium which some people are proposing because there have been a million a half of these drilled without any contamination of ground water and in situations like you're describing i want to know about that and find out what's accurate because there was also a pro trail that in dr creek there was a big natural gas fracking liquid spill which clean which killed the fish there only to find out that wasn't the case it was an algae bloom that came from the acidic water from acid mine drainage so i would want to make sure we're separating what is actually happening with what is being reported in these circumstances and in any case that there's anything with that with any merit to it we want to come down hard on it but we're in constant contact with made these natural gas companies saying we're monitoring this closely they understand the pressures on them and they understand part of the pressure is to make sure that they're hiring workers who are skilled workers not just people who say i have always wanted to live alone to do this and they do it well they don't have the safety kind of concerns out there and then and i've met with them  couple weeks ago to talk more about how they will be hiring more highly trained highly skilled workers not some who attended a couple day seminar but some who really had several hundred or seven thousand an hours of training in some of these areas so they know this person could hear to the safety issues on the water on the site preparation and everything involved so in any case someone hears about otherwise let me know i think my concern is in some cases the patrols and what comes out there may not be related to the fracking water at all some it also may be related to coal mine  tax revenue and is usually quite substantial the benefits the community the employment opportunities and things those are all benefits but we don't look at this and you brought up this idea of the mine drainage causing a problem know this is the kind of what is the long term you know the dust particles that come off of the drilling process i had a picture whatever bracket was here and the drill throws out this dust it covers everything people up in hickory i had the opportunity that weekend to attend a friend's retirement and people in the hickory area were telling me that in fact the dust was everywhere it was all over them and they were three miles away from it and it was all over the cars it was all  house and all the plants and everything else this is the dust that carries these other particles well you but it's also the dust that comes from cypress peroration when you have a housing development you're building a road they'll be dust and things come up for me and those kind of things i want to make sure they're tested  the issues about the rate and i'm not clear yet how much that is an issue other than the same as on any site that's prepared around here because we don't know if soil is background radiation everywhere but it's things we're pursuing and so much of this is always making sure the response was gas companies get accurate information out there at all times i'd like to see web sites and the e p a and e p a published information but i really want to be more d p i want the state to i monitor this closely because these are folks who live here this is their backyard their neighbors etc make sure also that all the roads are that obligation all roads have to be repaired all their employees have to follow the speed limit follow the laws and those things are all there but i also want to look at this way the balance is this pennsylvania is in a situation where we can go further with an economic depression or we can go into some of our greatest days of hiring and just as when the steel mills were here although those were those were the days when anything went short there were no clean air clean water laws the place was a hell with the lid off as it was said before and now were  in many ways but what some are proposing a stop at all and i say let's find a way to do this right and making sure we're using all the best technology that it has to be done safely that's been done cleanly or isn't going to get done and i think we can do it safely and  cleanly in many areas and pursue that the other part has to be to make sure that the legacy of this is not left behind as a problem when the people left the mines a lot of acid mine drainage remains there in those funds that companies have to pay to clean it up it's not fair when the streams continue loom them or orange from the the the rust in the iron ore and so forth cetera so it is a matter of making sure that there's no legacy of any contamination remains and that we get the benefits from all this and i think there are a lot of job benefits which we do which we dearly need and all these areas similar to that is the issue when you hear the president come to town and say wants of tax fossil fuels and basically block them when natural gas a fossil fuel coal is a fossil fuel this is our livelihood  forty thousand jobs now in this region which are dependent upon coal for the function everything from making steel to driving the train the trucks with the coal in him to to the power plants etc these are valuable jobs can be done perfectly yet know should we be pursuing with all the best and brightest we have to make sure we're working towards clean coal technology absolutely i love the idea that a national energy technology laboratories university pittsburgh carnegie mellon university western university penn state are working together in ways to continue this research this is exciting for our region we're not a region that is going to be able to energize our stuff with wind and solar although on some hot days we can sunny days we can do that on force we don't have a lot of those out here and if people don't want to see dams built  do hydroelectric we do need to conserve more energy we have to reduce this twenty to thirty percent we waste we need to use oil as a bridging fuel to pay for moving towards the future going to do independence we need to use a resource we have smartly wisely and cleanly as  that and that's where i see a lot of it's coming out of this but we want to sacrifice it in the meantime but i'm concerned on the jobs issue the jobs issue you have different types of people that actually work as you say the folks who actually work at the drop min themselves that's one i'm more concerned about those people and we have them in management who are looking to work with these companies to clean the water to do whatever to add engineering  services or legal fees or whatever attorneys these people are in government and they also they don't just they're not just sitting in government they also have other things going on in their lives and i'm always concerned about one issue will overcome the other the opportunity to make a profit might overcome the view of what could possibly happen here in the township they're negotiating now with looking at leasing township property not for sites to drill but for sites to come under the problem with the leases on these things are they have the right to anything they find ok i have a problem with that i also have a problem where have the right to go to any water source that they find to them fact stracke take the water from these these use somewhere between six hundred thousand to a million gallons each from what i've read  and fact that's an awful lot of water you know that's a that's probably as much water as a few of the communities around here use every day but a lot of this is being recycled and that's the move for that they will not be taking it from areas but in fact recycling through these companies have also offered for example to rebuild ductwork lake in your clays will to to build water treatment facilities to build pipelines systems we can be used to sewer lines after they're done with the drilling so there are there are advantages also to moving forward to make sure this is done right and this we're municipalities can handle snow let me add to this too we have greater airport which sits at about nine thousand acres and the drilling companies say they like to have the right to do that they pay about eleven thousand dollars per acre same so let's say twenty percent of the gas cost that's a lot of money going to pitt airport and someone with other reports made them washed in county airport parks whatever now on the one hand well you know kind of comes as we want money to build a water treatment facility to do with the d s and chemicals to come off a plane ok well those are those hazards chemicals of those once we should concern about yes they're not allowed going to groundwater the same token so will want to drill for natural gas they're building water through a facility can handle everything and while you're at it make sure the money is used to lower gate cost instead of being twelve or thirteen dollars per passenger get it down to three like charlotte interest some other airlines come back and hub here the last eleven thousand jobs to us here down a couple thousand the list goes on and on and yet the county then says well we don't want the money to stay at the airport we want to go into other programs well in the meantime you have parking lots that are filled with potholes furniture that's falling apart rugs that are filthy and gates that are empty i see this as an opportunity for some real economic boom in the airport create lots of jobs multiplier effect but move potential i really do see that i've read that they even expect now that there's up to three hundred years of gas potentially where it's going we have an interest state pipeline there too in fact with being able to put them on the ships so in fact there's a lot of questions we know this is are we going to put up with the problems like you talked earlier about the mines everybody here in western pennsylvania knows the problems that happen with the min conversation one hand to keep paying for unemployment checks or people aren't working to keep throwing money into stimulus programs which are done inefficiently or do we say we're only much better off trying to say let's solve the problems of how to create jobs in industry here in the clean and environmentally responsible and safe way for workers i'd much rather be working on that problem and say how do we keep people on the dole or dependent on government because there are no jobs well needless to say we've been given the word about a few more seconds left here would like to thank the congressman for coming again i look forward to once again having you back before the elections we'd like to have an opportunity for the students and everybody to have some discussion with you and then we'd like to have you folks back at the next time hopefully our current attorney