On Monday, Cabot’s Bill desRosiers hosted 40 community leaders from the Philadelphia area on a visit to Cabot operations and the Lackawanna College School of Petroleum & Natural Gas. Natural Gas NOW’s Tom Shepstone joined the group for the tour as an industry representative and helped answer some of the many questions from the visitors. Much of the visit centered around the many opportunities created by shale development and how Pennsylvanians can benefit. Below is his write up on the tour.
Natural Gas NOW
A group of approximately 40 residents from the Philadelphia region journeyed to Dimock, Pennsylvania on Monday in search of economic opportunity.
- Mayor John Linder
Cabot Oil & Gas played host to a group of minority community leaders from Southeast Pennsylvania who toured the Dimock area to learn more about shale gas opportunities. City of Chester Mayor John Linder was there, along with representatives of the American Association of Blacks in Energy, City Year Philadelphia, the Greater Philadelphia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, thePhiladelphia Opportunities Industrialization Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southeastern Pennsylvania and numerous other businesses and organizations, including Philadelphia area colleges and a prominent Pennsylvania law firm. It was, to say the least, a high-powered group and they liked what they saw.
The tour was organized with the help of several individuals who participated in the tour and the American Petroleum Institute. It was thoroughly enjoyable day for those of us from industry as we were pressed with question after question about how to take advantage of the economic opportunity shale gas offered.
Cabot’s Bill desRosiers served as guide as the driver of the big tour bus skillfully negotiated Susquehanna County’s many back roads and hills to visit one of the company’s drilling operations, see the Susquehanna County Career and Technology Center and get a tour of Lackawanna College’s School of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
It was a great day and along the way we talked about how places such as Chester and Philadelphia could benefit by not only sending people into the industry to help develop the Marcellus Shale, but also to take advantage of what it now offers – an inexpensive source of energy and feedstock for manufacturing and petrochemical development in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
We discussed the potential for Philadelphia, in fact, to become “the next Houston,” as former Pennsylvania DEP Secretary Mike Krancer so well articulated in the pages of Forbes. It ended with the normal sharing of business cards but each trade carried with it a little more enthusiasm than usual as we identified ways to work together. That was what the tour was all about, after all.
