Earlier today, we took you on a tour of the Drake Well Museum,
which documents the world’s first oil well. During our
interview, I asked curator Sue Bates when western Pennsylvania’s
oil boom had ended. “Well, we’re booming again,” was her
response. And Bates is right. This summer, Crawford County got
its first shale well: a 7,000-foot deep hole tapping into the
Utica Shale. The site is located about 30 miles away from the
Crawford County location where Edwin Drake drilled the world’s
first oil well. …Until now, the Utica and Marcellus formations
were largely untapped in the uppermost corner of northwestern
Pennsylvania and a broad swath that included more than 20
counties in the southeastern part of the state. That changed
this summer, at least in Crawford County, when rigs and crews
working for Texas-based Range Resources arrived in this rural
township of about 850 people. Range Resources, which developed
some of the state’s first successful wells into the Marcellus
Shale, drilled the Crawford County well i