Essay On Natural Resources

Throughout its history the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, renowned for its natural beauty and natural resources, lured its first settlers with that beauty and ease of access to those natural resources, whether those settlers were Native American tribes or colonists and frontiersmen. Since before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the prospect of material wealth derived from those resources inspired many hard working, innovative, and industrious citizens. People such as Colonel Edwin L. Drake, who drilled the first commercially successful oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, pioneered the development of the oil and gas industry, and ushered in the United State’s first oil boom. Its vast reserves of oil, gas, and coal, underground, and timber on the surface, played a pivotal role in the development of the Commonwealth as one of the nation’s leading industrial areas. It was only natural that the value of the rights in property on the surface and below the surface was realized. Early in the 20th Century, the Commonwealth began its acquisition of multitudes of tracts of land for state forests, state parks and game lands, the ownership rights to the surface and subsurface property, in many cases, were separate.

According to the Pennsylvania Constitution, Article I, § 27, “Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.” Therefore, in 2011, the Commonwealth took an inventory of state-owned lands that overlay the Marcellus and Utica Shale oil and natural gas formation. According to the 2011 report, An Inventory of State-owned Real Property and Subsur...

... middle of paper ...

...ce rights underlying state forests, state parks, and state game lands, where those rights are owned by a private party. The regulation of such private subsurface rights to protect public resources must be reasonable. That way such regulation is not so burdensome as to affect an unconstitutional “taking” of private property without just compensation. However, the owner of the subsurface rights is limited by a good faith “reasonable use” requirement as a limit to its access to the surface area for the development of subsurface rights.

As Pennsylvania experiences its second major oil and natural gas boom in a little over a hundred years, it is imperative that the Commonwealth strive to maintain a balance between the regulatory control of oil and gas operations of state owned land, and the private ownership of subsurface rights in oil and gas underlying those lands.