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New York is making its poorest residents pay for a political fantasy. The Cuomo administration banned shale fracking in 2014, bowing to the noise of "fracktivists." Hochul kept the ban and doubled down. The result: energy poverty for the people who can least afford it.

Twenty-six percent of New York City children live in poverty. Statewide, 2.7 million residents. Politicians respond with more taxation and finger-pointing at the Feds — but the real answer is sitting right underneath their feet. Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, untapped, while Albany digs the hole deeper with bad policy and fills it with tax dollars.

The numbers tell the story. A 2025 Heritage Foundation study found that New York’s fracking ban has created a wealth gap of $11,000 per person — $27,000 per family — compared to Pennsylvania neighbors just across the border where fracking is allowed. Before the ban, those counties were economic equals. Since then, Pennsylvania landowners have been collecting thousands of dollars per acre in lease payments and a sixteen percent cut off the top of all gas sales. New Yorkers get nothing for their rich reserves. It’s state-sponsored pauperism.

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If fracking were allowed, New York would receive billions in royalty payments. Tax receipts would swell from high-paying jobs and well-capitalized drillers. The tide from those trillions of cubic feet of natural gas would lift all boats.

I know this because I frack wells in New York. Mine might be the last company still standing. Over two decades, my company has fracked thousands of wells — no groundwater contamination, no low birth rates, no nosebleeds, no apocalypse. Nothing. Because fracking is safe. The data backs it up. But data deniers won’t have it, and so neither will the state’s neediest residents.

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The green alternative isn’t clean — it’s just cleaner-looking. Renewable mandates come at the cost of massive land use, strip mining, toxic battery production and a waste stream all their own. And every solar farm and wind turbine still has to be backstopped by natural gas or coal when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Albany knows this, but presses on anyway — leaving New Yorkers with residential electric costs 40% above the national average and natural gas prices 23% higher. The state imports nearly 80% of its energy, much of it from Pennsylvania. It’s the equivalent of bumming cigarettes instead of buying them. The smoke still fills your lungs.

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Cuomo and Hochul are masters of importing energy and exporting opportunity. They’ve bent before an unkind ideology at the expense of their poorest constituents. Natural gas is the lowest-hanging fruit New York has. It’s right there.

And this is still the "before" scenario. When AI data centers turn energy into a full-blown battleground — and they will — New York’s self-inflicted power shortage won’t just hurt the poor. It will hand the future to whoever has the gold. Governor Hochul, the fanatics you’ve been appeasing don’t pay those utility bills. Your constituents do. Open the taps.

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Dan Doyle is the president of Reliance Well Services and Arena Resources. He is also the author of the book, Of Roughnecks & Riches: A Start-Up in the Great American Fracking Boom.

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