New York's natural gas battle

The Marcellus Shale is a gold mine of natural gas – pitting gas companies and farmers against locals and environmentalists.

(Fortune Magazine) — The farmland around the college town of Oneonta, N.Y., is punctuated by barns and cows. But the quiet setting belies a battle that is raging over the Marcellus Shale, a largely untapped deposit of natural gas that runs from West Virginia to New York.

Gas companies, environmentalists, and cash-strapped farmers have been squaring off over the lucrative commodity, whose fate could be decided soon.

Experts say Marcellus is the largest natural gas deposit in North America, even bigger than Texas’s lucrative Barnett Shale. A Penn State study of the shale has placed the amount of recoverable gas there at 489 trillion cubic feet — more than 20 times the amount that the United States uses each year.

Companies including Chesapeake Energy and Hess Corp. have been vying with one another to tap the gas deposit, which could be worth nearly $2 trillion in revenue based on today’s low prices.

Fortune