Charging shales tax.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

I'll start by noting this minor surprise: An immense amount of natural gas is thought to be in the ground beneath a patch of rural North Carolina, and no body to date has evoked The Beverly Hillbillies. This perhaps is explained by the fact that it's too early to know whether any appropriately grizzled and rustic landowner will become an instant millionaire. Or maybe it's simply that most 1960s-era television shows have disappeared from the pop-culture radar. But now that I've plucked that bit of low-hanging "hillbillies" snark, let's move on to another matter. If North Carolina is about to become a big-time energy producer (cover story, January 2011), maybe we should affix to the wrist of every state legislator a bracelet carrying the initials WWWD--as in, What Would Wyoming Do?

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Discoveries of oil and natural gas tend to be game-changing events for states. Imagine what Texas would be like if oil hadn't been discovered there. Probably just a vast livestock ranch with an occasional cotton field to break up the monotony. No Cadillacs decorated with longhorns, no TV shows about scheming oilmen and no 50-mile-long ship channel that allows an inland city dominated by refineries (Houston) to call itself an ocean port. A Texas without oil might have meant a world without OPEC. You might not know this, but the most effective cartel in history was modeled after the Texas Railroad Commission, which back in the Gusher Age was given the job of regulating the supply of Texas oil to control prices.

North Carolina's energy boom will be less substantial, of course, but a little bit is better than nothing--and nothing is pretty much all we've had since the mid-20th century, when the Deep River coal mines petered out. Now geologists have declared that the shale formation in the same neighborhood as the mines (Lee, Chatham and Moore counties) harbors an impressive supply of natural gas. How much? Enough to supply the state for decades, perhaps enough to export as well. Within this news is a problem but also an opportunity for the state.

The problem is that the gas can only be retrieved through a process known as hydraulic fracturing--"fracking"--in which a hole is drilled into the ground and a mixture of water sand and chemicals is forced into the shale. This loosens the natural gas so that it flows freely. There is some belief that this contaminates groundwater, which, if true, would be a problem. But the real roadblock is that under...