CITIZEN POWER ALLIANCE

Almost 100 people came to a Tuesday night meeting on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

Held in downtown Ithaca's Unitarian Church, the meeting was hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension and attempted to provide "research-based information" on the horizontal hydraulic-fracturing (or fracking) technique that may begin in the Southern Tier by next year.

Brett Chedzoy, a natural resources educator and forester for Cornell Cooperative Extension in Schuyler County, called Marcellus gas drilling "perhaps the largest rural land issue that we've ever been faced with in upstate New York."

The Marcellus Shale runs under four states, from New York to West Virginia, and is "the largest natural gas formation in North America, possibly the largest in the world," Chedzoy said.

Jeffrey Jacquet works for the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell and formerly worked on gas drilling issues on behalf of a municipality in Wyoming. He went over the specifics of what happens during a gas well's development, production, and reclamation.

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