In chapter 3, a man named Terry Engelder who works at Penn State University as a geologist, announced in 2008 that “Marcellus held between 168 trillion cubic feet of gas.”-pg. 75. A company called USGS wants the oil rich land.
The story of this quote is that before a company called USGS had benchmarked the land, people had begun to want it for its shale. This area of land, as John A. Harper says in ch.3 of Under the Surface, he states in his spring 2008 issue of Pennsylvania Geology that “One would think, from all the fuss about the Marcellus, that it was a newly discovered gas reservoir containing enough gas to sustain America’s needs for decades. In reality, the Marcellus has been a known gas reservoir for more than 75 years. What has made it newsworthy, besides much hyperbole, is that the oil and gas industry has both new technology and price incentives that make this otherwise difficult gas play economical.”-pg.75
After John had said that, Wall Street concluded in ch.3 of Under the Surface that, “Rising natural gas prices; breakthroughs in horizontal drilling and fracking in shale gas plays in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and other states; and concern about global warming and dirty coal supporting the industry message that it was providing clean fuel.”-pg. 75
Later in the story, the report comes back about the Penn State drilling and the companies had bought the land for gas and oil drillings.
Fracking: A New Problem! 