For the past two and a half years, efforts to tap a massive shale formation deep underground for its natural gas have continued at a breakneck pace in most of central, western and northern Pennsylvania.

The nearest reaches of the Marcellus shale lie just beyond the Lehigh Valley, in Monroe and Carbon counties. But the rush to unlock the formation's 500-plus trillion cubic feet of natural gas will likely have an impact on the Valley's most important natural resource, the Lehigh River.

That's because in the shale-bearing counties north of the Valley, waters bubble up from the ground to form the headwaters of the Lehigh River — and if there's one thing drillers need besides natural gas, it's water. Millions of gallons for each well drilled.

That is one reason the Delaware River Basin Commission, which has review rights over large withdrawals of water, has issued a moratorium on well-drilling in its watershed, including in the northern counties. DRBC regulators, however, are planning to release proposed regulations soon, perhaps even later this month, that could signal the beginning of drilling in the region.

And, whether you believe natural gas extraction will provide a financial bonanza and abundant supply of domestic energy or a looming regional environmental catastrophe, it will have an impact on the Lehigh Valley's water if drillers get a green light.

"Any extractive industry is going to have an environmental cost — any," said Bucknell University professor Carl Kirby, who is studying water chemistry in central Pennsylvania, an area already being drilled. "The question is, are the benefits going to outweigh the costs?"

How that question is answered will have an indelible impact on eastern Pennsylvania and beyond.

Fracturing communities

Sitting at Tick-Tock's restaurant in Honesdale with other Wayne County residents who have signed leases with natural gas companies, Mike Uretsky, a soft-spoken retired professor of information systems at New York University, looks nothing like a wild-eyed land speculator.

"No one here is in the 'drill, baby, drill' group," he says.

With around 1,300 other homeowners in Wayne County, Uretsky and his companions at Tick-Tock's joined other property owners to negotiate a groupwide lease that provides environmental and legal protections, fair payments for the mineral rights to their land and royalties for extracted gas. His group, the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance, signed a deal last year with Hess Corp. that pays $1,500 per acre for the lease, with the promise of another $1,500 if it is determined the site is worth long-term drilling. Property owners also would receive 20 percent of the net royalties from extraction.

Members object to suggestions that their only interest is cashing in on a "gas rush," saying they had rejected offers of quick money without proper safeguards. "If the only thing we were interested in was money, we would have made a lease with someone else," Uretsky said.

At the same time, Chuck Coccodrilli, a member who also is president of the Southern Wayne Property Owners Alliance, said bringing new income and jobs to the region is a good reason to support drilling.

"My business is down 30 percent," said the self-employed antiques broker. "I think it's a very valid point" to highlight the economic benefits.

Ultimately, the property owners say, they should be able to use their land as they want. And it galls them that the DRBC, which is not an elected body, has effectively taken that right away with its drilling freeze.

Drilling opponents, the property owners said, have a "Not In My Backyard' outlook that ignores the economic and environmental benefits of providing America with a clean-burning, domestic source of energy.

"On a purely environmental level, they should be screaming for us," Coccodrilli said.

The property owners aren't oblivious to drilling mishaps that have occurred elsewhere in Pennsylvania. A well blowout in Clearfield County in June — which resulted in more than $400,000 in fines after operator errors caused gas and contaminated water to spew from a well for 16 hours — was an environmental mess, Coccodrilli said. But no one was hurt and the damage was contained, he noted. That outcome shows that fears over an enormous disaster like BP's spill in the Gulf of Mexico are exaggerated, he said.

Many of the public's concerns stem from the method of breaking up the shale deposits to release the natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing, or just "fracking." With the Marcellus shale, energy companies drill about a mile into the ground and then direct the drill thousands of feet horizontally. Water mixed with sand and chemicals is then pumped into the well at high pressure, causing the rock to fracture. The gas, and some of the water, are then extracted. While the process is not new, refinements have only recently made tapping the deep rock affordable to energy companies.

If done properly, members of the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance say, fracking is nothing to be feared. Failure to properly follow well construction techniques, not fracking, has caused problems, they said. Increased recycling of fracking water shows the industry's innovations are continually making the process safer, they noted.

Leasing the developable land will keep the northern counties as farms and woodlands, unlike the Lehigh Valley, which has been overbuilt, Coccodrilli said. He used to hunt pheasant in the Valley, Coccodrilli said, but now its only pheasants are the "Pheasant Drives" in suburban townships.

Meanwhile, the clean waters that have been emanating from the region for centuries will continue to flow, the group said.

"We think we've been providing [clean water] downstream for a long time," member Ted Korb said. "Ultimately, we want the same thing."

Protecting the river

With about 2,000 Marcellus shale wells drilled since 2008 — and permits for thousands more already approved — it's easy to see that shale drilling will affect area water supplies. Add a few hundred more wells and multiply by the three million to six million gallons of water it takes to frack each well, and that's how much water will be taken from ground and surface sources and injected deep into the earth. Only a small portion will return — tainted with chlorides and some radioactive material — to be treated and either released or recycled for more fracking.

"It's unnatural stuff" that is pumped into the ground to frack the wells, said Jerry McAward of Jim Thorpe River Adventures, referring to lubricants and other chemicals in the fracking fluid. "No one's really measuring the long-term damage here," he said.