A Fracking Bust For Pa. Town?

All Things Considered:

DETROW: Other stores on Towanda's main drag benefitted too. Jan Millard works at a place called the New Shoe Store. She says the drillers who moved to Towanda from the South brought their culture and their money with them.
JAN MILLARD: About, oh, probably three years ago now, I had a guy come in, and he said: Well, he said, where are all your pull-on boots? And I said: Oh, I hardly ever sell a pull-on boot. And he said: Well, you better get some then, he said, because you're going to need them. And the very next customer that came in after him asked for pull-on boots again. And I thought, holy smokes, we better get some pull-on boots.
DETROW: But a boom has a downside too. More people will lead to more crime. Police Chief Randy Epler says his force has had its hands full.
RANDY EPLER: DUIs, bar fights, domestic issues.
DETROW: And rent soared too. Apartments that went for $300 a month in 2008 cost more than $1,000 these days. The rent has stayed high, even though the rate of drilling has fallen. Bradford County's gas is what's considered dry. That means it doesn't contain valuable byproducts like ethane and butane that drillers can separate and sell. So as drilling companies have focused on western Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the gas is more valuable, the number of new wells has fallen. Jan Millard at the boot store says the shift was sudden.
MILLARD: I had so many regulars. The same guys would come in every week. It's like they didn't have any place else to go but the shoe store. And they'd come in, and, you know, you'd get kind of friendly with them. And it seems like so many of them have gone, just gone.
DETROW: Nobody in Towanda thinks the drillers are gone for good. The town has seen booms and busts before - coal a century ago, timber a few decades later. Towanda's economic fortunes now lie with something beyond the town's control: the price of natural gas. If prices increase enough to spur more drilling, the current slowdown may just be a lull in Towanda's latest boom. If they stay low, however, it could be the beginning of Towanda's next bust.

It will be interesting to see where things head in the Marcellus and Utica shales.  There are already reports of companies bugging out of eastern Ohio:

Chesapeake, the No. 2 gas producer in the U.S., announced in November it was pulling back from drilling for oil in eastern Ohio. Oklahoma-based Devon Energy Corp. announced in August disappointing results in Medina and Ashland counties last year and shifted east.
“Even with all the technology we have, those wells aren’t working out for a variety of good geological reasons,” Stewart said. “It’s very hard to get very large chain molecules to move through very dense rock even though you hydraulically fracture it.”

I think there is way more hype about the bright future of U.S. energy than any politicians or drillers want to admit.  I guess we'll see who's right.