Thousands of landowners downstate have sold their rights to drill for oil and natural gas for upfront fees ranging from $50 to $350 per acre, plus a cut of the profits.
Others are fighting to prevent the drilling out of fear that they could be exposed to drinking water contamination, earthquakes, toxic gases and industrialization.
In the middle of this battle are Illinois legislators who have yet to pass laws to deal with horizontal hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking. The issue is expected to be taken up again this year.
Horizontal hydraulic fracturing has opened up vast reserves of natural gas deposits in the U.S. that until now were impossible to tap. The drilling technique uses pressurized sand, water and chemicals to crack open layers of rock that trap such fuels hundreds or thousands of feet below ground.
The stampede to unleash such fuels has been compared to the Gold Rush of the 1840s. And in addition to the money being made by landowners in selling drilling rights, the fracking rush has brought jobs to other parts of the country.
"Other states have found the way to find the sweet spot to protect the environment and bring jobs; we should not miss that boat," said Tom Wolf, executive director of the Energy Council at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.
For people desperate for jobs, a shale gas boom downstate can't come soon enough. Many counties are dealing with unemployment rates that top 10 percent.
Proponents of fracking hope to inject new life into areas of the state where a once-vibrant coal industry has declined precipitously. At the same time, there's a fear drilling will never begin unless the companies that want to extract the gas know what regulatory risks they face.
"If legislation doesn't pass at some point this year, from the state's perspective the risk is that the industry might invest elsewhere in other states that have more favorable conditions to invest in and develop these sorts of wells," said Leonard Kurfirst, a partner at Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP in Chicago who practices environmental law, chemical product liability litigation and regulatory compliance.
The state has laws to deal with gas and oil wells, but those regulations date to 1983 — before modern horizontal drilling techniques were used.
Without meaningful regulation, some landowners are learning that their property rights don't necessarily extend to what's buried beneath the surface. Some have found that their mineral rights were sold years before or that if enough neighbors give permission to drill, they can be forced to join them. Others, who want to test their drinking water for the presence of fracking chemicals, are learning they could be denied access to such information if companies claim it's proprietary.
Commonly referred to as the New Albany shale play, the gas lies in the Illinois basin, a 60,000-square-mile area that encompasses parts of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates New Albany holds 11 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, approximately enough to meet the needs of about 5 million households for 30 years, according to the American Gas Association.
Hydraulic fracturing has been around for more than 60 years, but the modern methods that have led to the shale gas boom were not used until the turn of this century. Unlike vertical wells of the past, modern horizontal wells vastly multiply the exploitable area of a well and involve more chemicals and water.
According to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, about 250,000 gallons might be used to frack a vertical well compared with as much as 5 million gallons to frack a horizontal well.
Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing Our Environment (SAFE) is one of several organizations and environmental groups that want a moratorium on fracking in Illinois until a task force looks into the risks associated with hydraulic fracturing and recommends what kinds of regulations need to be in place.
The Illinois Chamber of Commerce is among those opposed to SAFE's proposal, which is similar to what New York state adopted with a four-year-old moratorium that has stalled natural gas development efforts.
"There is no energy source that is perfect for the environment or the economy. If there was, we would be using it," Wolf said.
Without regulations in place, a tacit moratorium already exists, Wolf said, explaining that drillers won't go forward with wells only to learn later that they face environmental regulations, new taxes or other unexpected hurdles.
The chamber released a study last month from David Loomis, a professor of economics at Illinois State University and director of the Center for Renewable Energy, estimating that downstate fracking could create 1,000 to 47,000 direct and indirect jobs depending on how many wells were drilled and what level of local resources were used.
Opponents countered that such jobs studies tend to be overly optimistic and don't take into account harmful environmental and quality-of-life issues that could come with fracking.
