Marcellus Shale: America's Future?

The Marcellus Shale Development

Future of the U.S.?

In 2008, Terry Engelder revolutionized the way the gas industry viewed the Marcellus Shale formation. Located beneath half of Pennsylvania, Southwest New York and West Virginia, the Marcellus Shale has been home to large natural gas deposits since the Devonian Sea, millions of years ago. Although there have been some hesitant stabs by small drilling companies prior to 2008, it wasn’t until then that Terry Engelder revealed to the world that the Marcellus Shale formation boasted 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas deep underground. Since that discovery, major drilling companies such as Range Resources have swooped in and installed hundreds of wells. along with pouring millions of dollars into acquiring leaseholds in order to control access to the gas. But just as the discovery spurred opportunities, it also stimulated great controversy concerning environmental issues and economic windfall. Before we can discuss why the development of the Marcellus Shale is such a hot topic, we must first look back at how it came to be.

389 million years ago, the Northeastern part of America was engulfed in what is called the Devonian Sea. The sea contained an abundance of algae that died over time and sank to the bottom where the remains collected into thick layers of sediment. As the slime degraded, it became preserved as rock along with other oceanic debris. Eventually as time went on and the Devonian Sea started shrinking, the rock layer warmed and the organic remains from the algae broke down, forming little pores containing hydrocarbons. The carbon and hydrogen byproduct became the methane that makes up the natural gas in the Marcellus shale today.

When it was discovered that large quantities of methane gas could be removed efficiently, using the processes of horizontal drilling and fracking, from the deposit and used as a clean gas alternative to coal and oil, the opportunity for a clean alternative...