During the past 10 years, major portions of America’s rural communities have experienced the dramatic impacts resulting from the development of hydraulic frackuring and horizontal drilling in the oil and gas industry.  These impacts, both positive and negative, put pressure on the cultural, physical, and economic infrastructure of these communities that they were not prepared to handle.  Their limited resources and budgets made accessing national expertise and knowledge beyond their reach. While Hydrocarbons (oil/gas) are the dominant energy source today, we recognize in the future renewable energy will continue to grow in the energy space and we will include those sources & regions in our membership.  Developing solutions to problems they had never faced before was done solely on the knowledge found in their local communities. Although many of these regions formed community-based organizations to focus on the issues, their experiences, successes and failures, were kept local.  There was no national forum in which they could tell their stories, share lessons learned, and meld their voices into one that could be heard at a national level.

Over several meetings during 2017 – 2018, a group of rural shale stakeholders met and developed an organization called America’s Rural Energy Coalition, Inc. (AREC). The purpose of the organization is to combine the experiences and resources from the multitude of rural communities where active oil and gas exploration and production is occurring. The goal being to use the combined strength of all the regions to bring attention and resources to the challenges and opportunities they face.  By bringing together populations from across multiple states, we believe we can help build national interest, especially in urban America, in maintaining the energy independence we have achieved over the past few years.  This rural-urban partnership will ultimately lead to advancing our primary goal – sustainable rural economic development.