I don’t know about the rest of the readers of the Ethereal Voice, but I have been hearing of gas companies paying top dollar to various individuals plus the promise of royalties. The talk from people that know is that the price being paid out is 2500 dollars an acre for the right to drill for gas in the hill country around here plus the promise of big royalties should stuff be taken out of the ground. As this article notes….

Geologists and energy companies have known for decades about the gas in the Marcellus Shale, but only recently have figured out a possible — though expensive — way to extract it from the thick black rock about 6,000 feet underground.

Like prospectors mining for gold, energy executives must decide whether the prize is worth the huge investment.

“This is a very real prospect, very real,” said Stephen Rhoads, president of the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association. “This could be a very significant year for this.”

The shale holding the best prospects covers an area of 54,000 square miles, from upstate New York, across Pennsylvania into eastern Ohio and across most of West Virginia — a total area bigger than the state of Pennsylvania.

It could contain as much as 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, according to a recent study by researchers at Penn State University and the State University of New York at Fredonia.

From what I hear, this is rapidly turning into a gold rush and I hope it does not all end in tears. That 50 trillion cubic feet sounds real cool. But it relies on expensive technology describe in this Oil Drum article that has never be tried out on a large scale before.