Gas drilling's promise, perils rile townsfolk

Ron Hilliard came back from church one Sunday to find hundreds of plastic $5, $10, $20 and $100 bills hanging on his fence in Flower Mound, Texas, another message from townsfolk angry at him for signing a lucrative natural gas drilling lease for his suburban Dallas property.

In Damascus, Pa., about 1,500 miles away, drilling advocate Marian Schweighofer awoke one morning to the word "LORAX" -- from the Dr. Seuss book about environmental destruction -- spray-painted on the road near her family's 712-acre farm.

Hilliard and Schweighofer have never met, yet both are living with the nastiness and rancor erupting in communities nationwide over the volatile issue of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

This technique -- used with horizontal drilling -- allows rich stores of gas to be extracted from once out-of-reach, dense shale formations more than a mile underground. Intense drilling activity is under way in the Barnett Shale of Texas, the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania, and other producing shale regions around the country. As tens of thousands of Americans become energy magnates in their own backyards, tens of thousands more worry about environmental dangers. The industry insists the process is safe, for people and the environment.

This energy boom has turned neighbor against neighbor, split towns and families in bitter disputes, and touched off sharp debates over the sudden emergence of gas companies and their 14-story drilling rigs, some rising in the middle of towns and neighborhoods.

One side touts the jobs and prosperity drilling brings, allowing businesses to flourish and down-on-their-luck farmers to hang on to their land. Gas leases have made millionaires of some property owners. Regions long struggling economically are suddenly flush.

On the other side are those who either won't gain anything or who fervently believe the wealth isn't worth the risk. Alarmed by toxic spills, scattered drill site explosions and tainted drinking water, they fear a reduced quality of life and declining property values.

"Those who own their mineral rights are happier than a pig in mud," said Flower Mound resident Chris Tomlinson, who is making thousands of dollars a month from the gas wells drilled on his land. "Those who don't, want it to go away."

Fracking opponents complain the industry has taken environmental and safety shortcuts in their zeal to reap the vast stores of gas once locked tight within the shale.

The acrimony is not likely to subside anytime soon. Even with some 26,000 wells drilled in 16 states through the end of 2009 -- more than half of those in Texas -- the shale gas revolution is still relatively young.

Most of the wells have been drilled in the past decade, particularly in Pennsylvania's white-hot Marcellus Shale region and in the Barnett Shale of Texas, where the new extraction techniques were perfected and the boom began in earnest in 2006. Hundreds of thousands more wells could be drilled in coming decades, according to drilling companies and energy officials.