Natural gas prices are in a terrible spot for producers. In the past couple of weeks, we've talked about historic lows in the price for that commodity. NG hasn't been this cheap in more than seven years. And despite the pump fake move in the markets back over $3 last week, the trend is that there still is too much gas everywhere in the short term.

Now, at some point, either the economy will go back to demanding more gas to work metals or make fertilizer or chemicals. Better still, we might have another monster winter when we have to spend up to heat our homes.

No matter. The drilling goes on here in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in the Marcellus shale. And whether America needs the gas this winter or not, it's going to continue.

I chatted last week with some of the guys from Chesapeake Energy about where we are in terms of the big picture. And in terms of a baseball game, we may be just getting to the bottom of the first inning.

Chesapeake had its greatest success in some similar rock across Texas and Oklahoma called the Barnett shale. That patch has produced thousands of wells and will produce tens of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas before it runs dry. Only something like 30 horizontal wells have been cut here. Estimates of the Marcellus have it as high as 60 trillion cubic feet.

Even at today's meager prices, that's something like $200 billion in the footprint from West Virginia to New York state.

With the costs of drilling and labor shrinking as other companies pull back, it is cheaper to drill now than it was in 2007, when CHK first started its horizontal program here. The company has 17 drilling rigs in the play now and will more than double the number by 2011.

Why does this make sense? Even if the gas market continues to be unprofitable for many, the finding and drilling costs here for Chesapeake are wickedly cheap - in most cases, less than $1 for an MCF of gas that sells for $3 in the markets. And with the help of asset sales to partners like Statoil, those fall to 50 cents or less across some of the nearly 2 million acres of leases the companies share over the Marcellus.

More important, the Marcellus gas is closer to where the most folks in America use it - the East Coast. Natural gas is the heating fuel of choice for large population centers like Washington, D.C., and New York City. Less miles by pipeline means less expense in getting it to market and a higher price than you would get for the same gas if it were out west.

Throw on the preponderance of the chemical industry and oil refining in the east, and you have a healthy mix of customers for what's being pulled out of the ground by Chesapeake and a gaggle of others here.

The future? Growth and more growth. While West Virginia has some of the best laws to help expand energy exploration in the east, others don't. Pennsylvania was only recently talked down from a new severance tax on gas; that won't last. And New York has never been drilled before ... it still hasn't. No Marcellus depth wells have even been started in that state at the northern tip of the formation.

It takes a lot of water admittedly to make some of these work. The fracturing process requires sometimes 5 million gallons of water for one huge multi-stage deep Marcellus well. Pennsylvania and West Virginia thus far have plenty.

And hundreds of miles of more permanent pipeline will be required to get the gas to market. Right now, gas drilling is working by pipeline geology, which means you can't stray too far from existing pipes to drill. And over 2 million acres, that's not a lot of land yet.

Rob Cornelius of Parkersburg writes about energy and other topics for The State Journal. His e-mail address is robcwv@gmail.com.