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Todd Owen of Sandusky, Mich., maintains a natural gas drilling rig for Range Resources in 2008 on farmland in Amwell, Pa., just southwest of Pittsburgh. Heavy industry has invaded the countryside because of drilling opportunities for the Marcellus Shale to extract natural gas. (Jahi Chikwendiu)
By Darryl Fears
Monday, February 7, 2011
In their sliver of western Maryland, Garrett County residents like to boast of night skies so clear that you can see satellites lumber across the heavens, a picturesque deep creek that is the state’s largest inland body of water, and adventure tourism that Indiana Jones types love.
But land speculators who showed up in the county in 2008 with offers to lease farm acres had other interests. Their eyes were set on a valuable resource deep underground: natural gas deposits buried in thick layers of Marcellus Shale, a black, organic-rich shale found under the Appalachian region.
And just like that, Garrett County, population 29,000, became fully engaged in the nation’s debate over hydraulic drilling for natural gas and its risk of contaminating drinking water, joining another Washington-area local government, Rockingham County, Va.
The American Petroleum Institute maintains that hydraulic drilling is safe, “a tried-and-true technology that promises thousands of new jobs and vast and indispensable supplies of clean-burning energy,” said Carlton Carroll, a spokesman.
