After attending several of this year's natural gas exploration and drilling meetings and seminars, the best I can say about them was they created almost as many new questions as they answered. Trying to get a clear layman's answer to what seemed a fairly simple question often resulted in either evasively worded responses or irrelevant dialogs. It was like asking someone for the time and they'd tell you how to build a watch. Small wonder so many people have become frustrated.

I'm not against the ongoing projects to pull gas from the huge Marcellus Shale reserves our area sits atop (estimated to hold almost 170 trillion cubic feet of natural gas), but to be honest I'd like to know what will occur farther down the line, after all these wells and pipelines are finished and moving their valuable cargo to the various accessible use-sites. After all, the entire operation from beginning to end enjoys basically carte blanc freedom with realistically few restraints when compared to other gargantuan environmental and geophysical projects.