If you live in the region, you only have to walk through the downtowns to see what I'm saying.

Whether it's Stubanville, Ohio, Bolero, Ohio, Wheeling, West Virginia, Wainsburg, Pennsylvania,

all of those downtowns are hollowed out shells of what they once were.

Hey there, this is Drill, I'm Amy Westervalt, and that was Sean O'Leary from the Ohio River

Valley Institute. O'Leary is a native West Virginian who's watched firsthand what first

coal and then gas did to his community. He doesn't live in West Virginia anymore, and

that has become a topic of criticism from people who did not appreciate some of his recent

work. Last month, O'Leary and the organization he works for released a report that really

made the oil and gas guys mad. It takes on a simple question. Did the fracking boom actually

deliver all those economic benefits we've heard the industry talk so much about? The report

specifically looks at the region O'Leary has dubbed fracalacha, encompassing parts of

the Ohio River Valley in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. As you might recall from

every election cycle in the last decade, whenever people start talking about the environmental

impacts of fracking or the potential of a fracking ban, the industry has the same response.

The amount of jobs that are created by this technology cannot be overstated. The United

States Chamber of Commerce, for instance, tells me, doing away with this one technology

would lead to the loss of nearly 19 million jobs here in the United States. The US is now

the leading producer in the world of natural gas and oil, and that has powered benefits

in our economy. Tens of thousands of jobs paying an average salary of $50,000. That's

what the Ohio shale coalition says is coming to Ohio. But O'Leary and his colleagues analyzed

economic data from before during and after the fracking boom in the Ohio River Valley and

found something else.

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