COVINGTON, Pa. -- A city of semis appeared out of nowhere on a hillside here a few weeks ago, all working in tandem with machinery that reached more than a mile deep into the earth's surface to lay claim to a piece of Pennsylvania's economic future.

It's a scene appearing again and again in two of the four corners of the Keystone State, in the valleys southwest of Pittsburgh as well as these rolling hills in Tioga County 35 miles south of Corning.

Hydraulic fracturing -- the drilling technique that taps into the vast gas reserves of the Marcellus Shale -- may be banned for now in gas-rich, cash-poor upstate New York, but it's remaking the economy and the environment of the state just to the south.

A local job development group said the gas boom is expected to bring 3,396 jobs to Pennsylvania's Northern Tier this year -- and an industry-backed Penn State study said state and local governments can expect nearly $1 billion in gas-related state and local tax revenue next year alone.

But Pennsylvania's natural gas boom also has resulted in a nonstop rumble of trucks and at least a temporary scarring of the landscape as well as deep divisions within communities that no one ever expected to be boomtowns.

For proof of the complexity of it all, just listen to Tom Brian and Peggy Shay.

"This gas thing is a wonderful thing for our township," said Brian, of Osceola, which borders New York's Steuben County. "Everybody's going to get something out of it."

When the state government in Albany delayed drilling in New York, it "did Tioga County a great favor," Brian said.

He expects to get a minimum of $12,000 in royalties a year once drilling begins on his property.

"I should send them roses," he said of the New York State officials who put drilling on hold. "They've transferred all the action to us."

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Related: A look at Pennsylvania's natural gas boom

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But for people like Shay, who moved to the once-bucolic Tioga County village of Nelson to escape the pace of life in the nation's capital, the Northern Tier's sudden transformation seems a bit jarring.

"I have seen three well sites develop in the last two months," said Shay, who has resisted entreaties to lease her 50 acres of land on a nearby lake.

"First comes the mailbox in the corn field, then the gravel trucks and excavating equipment," she said. "I moved back home to enjoy the beauty and simplicity of it all, and now I don't know what I think."

Enormous gas reserve

More than a mile below all that ragged beauty lies part of a vast black shale that stretches from upstate New York to West Virginia.

Dubbed the Marcellus Shale because it juts out of the ground in the Syracuse suburb of that name, the rock could hold the biggest gas reserve this side of Iran.

A Penn State study funded by the gas industry estimates the Marcellus holds the energy equivalent of 87 billion barrels of oil -- enough to fuel the world for three years with what's universally regarded as the cleanest fossil fuel.

Getting to that gas isn't easy. Wells are drilled more than a mile deep, then turned horizontally into a hard shale that must be fractured with blasts of water, sand and chemicals for the gas to be captured.

Called hydraulic fracturing -- or "fracking," for short -- the process can require upward of 200 tanker trucks of water.

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Diagram: How the fracking process works

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So again and again, Pennsylvania hillsides are turning into truck stops like this one in Covington, which was considerably smaller than most when the wells were being fracked in mid-August. That's because Seneca Resources, which operates the site, pumps in water from a local source.

The trucks are gone now, but three weeks ago, this fracking site looked nothing like the farmland that surrounds it. Instead, it was a loudly rumbling construction zone.

The fracking site will now be landscaped back into farmland, leaving only a couple of water tanks, some support equipment and a few wells no taller than the men who will maintain them.

Some 271 such wells have been drilled in Tioga County since the start of 2009, and thousands more are forecast to be drilled in the coming years across Pennsylvania.

It's all happening faster than predicted because higher gas prices in recent years encouraged production, and because the Marcellus is even richer in gas than the drillers thought.

Chesapeake Energy, the largest gas driller in Pennsylvania's section of the Marcellus, said its wells are turning out nearly 40 percent more gas than the company originally expected.

While production may rise and fall with gas prices, gas companies expect to be drilling here for decades to come.

"It is overwhelming, the scale of it," said Guy Shirey, manager of production and reservoir engineering for Seneca Resources, a subsidiary of Buffalo's National Fuel Gas Co.

The ramifications are just as overwhelming.

In a time of persistent unemployment nationwide, unemployment in the Pennsylvania counties of Tioga and Bradford -- the most fracked counties in the state -- fell sharply in the past year.

"It's really an opportunity for a lot of prosperity," said Robert J. Blair, president of the Tioga County Development Corp. "You're eventually going to see an awful lot of people get very wealthy."

Some will get wealthy

The opportunity is already playing itself out in many ways.

Among the luckiest are people like Tom Wivell, who leased the mineral rights to his 285-acre farm to Seneca Resources for the creation of some of its Covington gas wells.

While gas prices and the productivity of individual wells will determine exactly how much money Wivell and his wife will make out of the deal, there's no doubt they will do well.

The average Pennsylvania farmer who leases his land to a gas company could get $75,000 in royalty income the year after the wells start pumping, and more than $650,000 over 20 years, according to a lease calculator offered by Penn State Cooperative Extension.

"For me, it basically means I'll have something to retire on," said Wivell, a long-struggling cattle farmer.

Tales about suddenly wealthy farmers abound here, but they're by no means the only ones reaping the benefits of the boom. For example, the Catholic Cemeteries Association of the Diocese of Pittsburgh recently leased more than 1,000 acres for drilling beneath the buried caskets.

Businesses are enjoying spin-off effects from all the drilling, too. For example, in Wellsboro, business at In My Shoes is up 20 percent in the past year as the "roughnecks" have flocked to town from the gas fields of Texas and Wyoming.

"It's been very good for us," said Tami Lewis, the store's owner, who has stocked up on steel-toed boots for the well workers.

Landlords are renting out apartments to the roughnecks for more than $1,000 a month.

And there's construction everywhere. Nearby Mansfield, population 3,412, has a new Microtel and a Lowe's on the rise south of town. Two hotels are expanding in Wellsboro, the county seat and home to 3,323 people.

Witnessing it all, New Yorkers such as Larry Mundy can't help but think the same thing should be happening in the Southern Tier.

Mundy has leased his 82-acre farm in Steuben County to a gas company, and he thinks Albany is getting in the way of progress.

"They're using the tactic of studying it to death," Mundy said of the Department of Environmental Conservation's two-year examination of the fracking process, which is nearly complete.

But with the State Senate recently voting to extend a fracking moratorium into next spring, Mundy is worried.

"At this rate, it could be 2020 before anything is done," he said. "And all the while, New York is being pushed further into the hole by the shortsightedness of our comic governor and our partying politicians."

Many have concerns

Despite Pennsylvania's newfound wealth, many residents share concerns about fracking with their neighbors to the north.

In fact, Pennsylvania's experience with fracking has profoundly influenced the New York debate. State Sen. Antoine M. Thompson, the Buffalo Democrat who pushed the fracking moratorium, has traveled twice to Dimock, a Pennsylvania community where some residents have seen their water wells fill up with gas, to gauge the environmental impact of fracking.

Tioga County has so far encountered nothing like the problems endemic in Dimock, but that doesn't stop some residents from worrying.

Some fear spills of the toxic waste water that results from the fracking process -- which is sometimes stored in open ponds.

"I am concerned about health and safety and animals getting into these ponds," said Patty MacDonald of Middlebury Township, who, with her husband, reluctantly leased 10 1/2 acres of their property to a gas company.

Noting how important hunting is to the region's lifestyle and economy, she added: "How are we going to know if the deer sucked something out of these ponds?"

She's not alone in worrying that the way of life in the long-sleepy Northern Tier has changed for the worse.

"We've had truck traffic day and night for weeks on end," said Harold Bitler, a retired high school history teacher who lives in the rural enclave of Brookfield, near a fracking site.

The more he and his wife, Lisa Kreisler Bitler, have studied fracking, the more their concerns have grown.

The Bitlers leased the mineral rights on their 115 acres of property to a gas company in March of 2008. But now they're worried about possible environmental damage and the pace of the change they see all around them.

"If I knew then what I know now, I never would have signed the lease," Harold Bitler said.

"The faster you do things," his wife added, "the more troubles happen."

Some feel cheated

Other landowners, who asked not to be identified by name, griped that they had received one-time payments of as little as $5 an acre on renewable five-year leases negotiated and signed several years ago -- way short of the $2,000 per acre that's been common this year.

"You had 25 or 30 companies in here trying to get their hands on everything they could get their hands on for very low rates," said Earle Robbins, a former cooperative extension leader from Tioga County who now works with landowners to ensure that they get the best deal possible. "Most signed without any legal advice."

Why would gas companies offer landowners so little a few years ago and so much recently?

"It's just supply and demand," responded Jack Showers, a spokesman for East Resources, one of the major drillers in Tioga County.

Then again, it's also a matter of ignorance and knowledge.

"Five years ago, not many people could even spell Marcellus," Showers conceded.

Shay, for one, is glad she waited before signing.

"I wanted to be more knowledgeable about this," said Shay, whose file of newspaper clips and reports on the Marcellus Shale is now about a foot thick.

Shay said she's concerned that gas wells will litter the landscape she loves so much, yet she admits that there's intense pressure to join a boom that seems unstoppable.

When a gas company "land man" comes to make an offer or negotiate, she gets a hard sell.

"I ask a question and they immediately say, 'Well, if you don't lease, we'll just go around you and you'll get nothing," she said.

Monday: The environmental impact of Pennsylvania's gas boom.

jzremski@buffnews.comnull