The people who run Pittsburgh's main airport have a unique plan to save it
By N.B. | Washington, DC
PITTSBURGH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT is in trouble. Nearly a fifth of its gates are shuttered, many more are vacant, and it has been over a decade since US Airways decided to stop using it as a hub. A terminal that was built for 30m passengers a year now serves about 8m. On July 31st, United Airlines announced—despite the wailing of local politicians—that it would end its daily non-stop service between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles International.
Now the New York Times reports that the airport's executives have found a solution to its woes—hydraulic fracturing, better know as fracking:
[Pittsburgh International's] quiet runways, it turns out, are sitting on enough natural gas to run the whole state of Pennsylvania for a year and a half, and this month, Consol Energy will drill its first well here to tap the gas, which county officials say will bring them nearly half a billion dollars over the next 20 years.
The well is outside the airport fence but, with horizontal drilling, will extract the rich deposits that lie under the terminals and runways.
The airport needs the money; it currently devotes nearly half its budget to servicing its enormous debts. But flyers shouldn't necessarily worry. As the Times notes, Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver, two huge international airports, have both had oil and gas wells on their grounds for years without big safety issues. There are, of course, environmental concerns, but those aren't unique to airport fracking and need to be addressed in a comprehensive way, not on a site-by-site basis. The airport has been saddled with debts it can't really afford to pay. This is a way out, and it is hard to blame local officials for taking it.
All that said, this episode is a useful lesson for other cities. Future airport usage is hard to predict, and bankruptcies have allowed many US airlines to escape from leases. Municipalities thinking of expanding their airports should look to Pittsburgh's experience and consider carefully before spending taxpayer funds to prop up local air travel. Not every airport authority is going to be lucky enough to find a sea of money buried underneath the runways.
