Beneath the feet of nearly every Pittsburgher lies one of the richest deposits of potential energy in the world. The hard part is agreeing on what to do with it.Underlying nearly two-thirds of Pennsylvania.-including Allegheny County-and extending into New York. and West Virginia., the Marcellus Shale rock formation contains what the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) estimates to be trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. According to a Penn State University study, this is enough natural gas to “meet the demand of the entire world for nearly three years.”Until recently, these gas deposits had been “prohibitively expensive” to access, according to the DEP. That all changed with the advent of an extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The process involves drilling a well into the Marcellus Shale, then blasting a high-pressure solution of water, sand and other chemicals into the well to break up the shale and release the gas. There are two primary debates surrounding the issue. The first is whether or not the process contaminates groundwater. The second is whether or not, and to what degree, the state should tax the gas extraction.The Marcellus Shale Coalition, based in Canonsburg, is a consortium of several natural gas drilling companies. Coalition spokesman, Travis Windle, characterized the process of fracking as “a safe way to harvest clean-burning energy.””Hydraulic fracturing, the technology that is used in nine out of ten wells nationwide, has never resulted in groundwater contamination,” Windle said in a phone interview.On the other side of the debate stands the Marcellus Shale Protest, an organization of concerned citizens that believes fracking will irreparably damage the region’s waterways. Their motto is “No Fracking Way!”Protest director Gloria Forouzan admitted they face an uphill battle.”We certainly don’t have the resources of the Marcellus Shale Coalition,” Forouzan said in a phone interview, “but we’re working on a painstaking, door-to-door, one-on-one approach to educating the public. Some people have nebulous ideas about [drilling], and we want everyone to have the facts.”She characterized information coming from the Marcellus Shale Coalition as propaganda.”I’m sure if we had tens of thousands of dollars and could pay the people at Penn State University to conduct a study on our behalf, we could get the results we wanted from the study,” Forouzan said of the Coalition-backed fracking study.Forouzan acknoweledges that, with over $4 billion already invested in Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale Drilling projects, it is unlikely the drilling will be halted. Her focus is regulation.”[Marcellus Shale Drilling] is taking the state by storm and there are not adequate regulations in place to deal with it,” Forouzan said.Part of this regulation would be a severance tax that charges the gas companies for the extraction of natural gas.On Sept. 30, the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill that would enable the state to collect 39 cents for every 1,000 cubic feet of gas extracted. This would equate to a roughly 9.8 percent tax on natural gas extraction.Since then, the bill has been under debate in the state senate with no compromise reached. Senate republicans have proposed a 1.5 percent tax that would increase to 5 percent after five years. Gov. Ed Rendell has proposed an initial tax of 3 percent that would increase to 5 percent after five years. According to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, Pennsylvania. is one of the only natural gas producing states that does not currently impose a severance tax.Public opinion has been hard to gauge on the topic. In March, a poll conducted by Franklin and Marshall College found that 49 percent of Pennsylvanians oppose a severance tax while 35 percent of people support it.More recently, an August poll commissioned by Rendell found that 78 percent of Pennsylvanians support a tax while just 14 percent oppose it.Franklin and Marshall pollster Terry Madonna blamed public indifference.”What we’ve found is that on this issue, the public needs to be educated in order to offer an informed opinion,” Madonna said. “It’s not an issue that we’ve found many voters have a strong opinion on, or an issue that they’re following closely or talking about at the dinner table. It’s not a tax they would have to pay directly like sales or gasoline or cigarette taxes, so I don’t think they’re thinking about it as much.”With both the Penn State study and estimates by the DEP estimating potential Pennsylvania state revenue from a severance tax in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the cash-strapped commonwealth may benefit from finding some common ground on this divisive issue.