CITIZEN POWER ALLIANCE

It’s unlikely that anyone’s going to drill in the town of Tully into the now-famous Marcellus shale because the rock is too close to the surface. But that doesn’t mean drilling rigs and hydrofracking will bypass the town — and a large piece of Central New York.

Despite all the attention given to the Marcellus shale, there’s another, deeper rock layer in New York that is an intriguing mystery — bigger but economically an unknown.

It’s the Utica shale: a layer of rock thousands of feet deeper than the Marcellus and less well-studied. It covers a greater footprint of Central New York and might be an attractive target to drillers in areas that where the Marcellus doesn’t exist or is too shallow to hold any natural gas.

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