>An update on an earlier post – the bill calling for a two-year study of natural gas drilling in western Maryland’s Marcellus shale deposits is dead.
Drew Cobbs, a lobbyist for the natural gas industry, said he was informed recently that the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee has given up on trying to forge a consensus on the bill, HB852/SB634. A committee staffer confirmed it.
Cobbs, director of the Maryland Petroleum Council, said what killed the bill was the O’Malley administration’s insistence on limiting the ability of state regulators to approve natural gas wells after the first year of the study.
Talks between the gas industry, legislative leaders and the administration had yielded a tentative agreement to ban any drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for the first year of the study.
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