It's what some call a modern day gold mine, an economic engine, a fuel to our future.
It's expected to generate $20 billion in revenue and 212,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania alone.
It can be tapped on almost any landscape: in fields or pastures, in forests and on mountains.
Shale.
Researchers have always know it was there, and thanks to a relatively new process -- horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing -- its expansive reserves of natural gas thousands of feet underground are finally being tapped.
"The vast majority of acreage here has been leased for shale drilling," said Mark Mann, a Penn State Extension educator in Sullivan County, Pa. "The vast majority of people here are anticipating good things."
What is the Marcellus Shale?
Gas companies began drilling shale in the early 2000s in states like Texas with its Barnett shale and Wyoming with its Niobrara shale. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, they're after Utica and, especially, Marcellus.
The Marcellus shale is a layer of rock 5,000 to 9,000 feet beneath the ground under parts of New York, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.
It's made of organic sediment deposits millions of years old. As the deposits have decayed, methane and other natural gases formed and are trapped in fractures in the rock they've created due to the pressure.
According to Penn State's Marcellus Education Team, there could be up to 516 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Marcellus Shale. The U.S. now produces just 30 trillion cubic feet a year.
The Utica Shale
The Utica shale covers a much larger area in Ohio than does Marcellus. But both are beneath the Mahoning Valley. Utica, however, is located a few thousand feet below Marcellus.
While research is still being done on the Utica shale, it's believed that the same horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracing methods will be used to extract its natural gas, which unlike Marcellus' dry form, is thought to be liquid-rich.
That means it contains oil and could prove to be more valuable.
Horizontal Drilling with Hydraulic Fracturing -- A New Technology
Because of the shale's depth and the existence of the fractures that are spread throughout its layers, the techniques used to drill shallow wells -- straight down -- were not effective in retrieving the natural gas.
That technology wasn't developed until a few years ago.
With horizontal drilling, a rig drills thousands of feet down like it would for a regular vertical well.
But the newly-designed shale drills have joints and a shaft that then can turn 90 degrees and drill horizontally for up to 5,000 feet, according to Penn State research, reaching more fractures that contain the natural gas.
"One of the beautiful things about the technology and what it allows us to do in the shale plays like the Marcellus and Utica," said Scott Chesebro, an engineer manager with Williamsport's Anadarko Petroleum Corporation office. "It's much different than the old, conventional style drilling that occurred in Ohio and Pennsylvania. With the advent of horizontal drilling...we can cover a larger area from a single pad."
A steel casing is installed to stabilize the well bore and protect groundwater, according to Penn State.
Then comes the second part of the new technology that allows this type of drilling: hydraulic fracturing.
Because the natural gas is in the shale's fractures, water is then pumped into the shale at a high pressure to push it out. Between one and three million gallons can be used to frac just one well, according to Penn State research.
That water contains sand and sometimes additives like those found in products like swimming pool chemicals, hair coloring and laundry detergents.
Most of the frac water stays underground in the shale formation. The remaining 10 to 30 percent is pumped out and recycled or pumped into wells thousands of feet below the surface for permanent storage.
The whole process can take more than one year.
"I've been doing this all my life, and I'm still amazed (at the technique)," said Chesebro.
Leasing, prepping and building a drill site can take over a year. For a look at the different components of a drill site in the Tiadaghton State Forest along with a timeline of how long each step takes, click the link below.
