In the early and mid-20th century, Broome County, NY was a boom town. Some 20,000 people worked for Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. By the mid-20th century, another 20,000 worked at what had been a little startup founded in Endicott in 1888, originally known as the Tabulating Machine Company, later renamed IBM. Yes, IBM was started here! Also in the mid-20th century this area produced one of our country’s most valuable and perhaps underrated inventors–Edwin A. Link–who invented the flight simulator and started Link Aviation, which eventually grew to employ thousands in the simulation business.

Fast forward to today. Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company sold or off-shored it’s U.S. manufacturing operations and moved it’s headquarters to Tennessee–today it employs no people in Broome County. IBM sold most of its local interests and now employs something like 1,200 people at one remaining location. Link Aviation has been sold and resold many times, with most of its jobs moved to Texas and other locations. Maybe you’ll understand why this area’s collective psyche has been in a permanent state of depression since the 1980s, when many of these changes occurred.

Enter natural gas. (No, this is not a punch line or joke.) It’s early days yet, but there’s quite a stir going on if you own any amount of land in this part of the country. With energy prices skyrocketing, one of the great underutilized resources in the U.S. is suddenly becoming popular and profitable–natural gas. And who woulda thunk there’s potentially a large reservoir of it sitting beneath Broome County?

Today’s Press & Sun-Bulletin provides background information about this phenomenon, along with a hint at what may be “happy days are here again” for our area. Here’s a few paragraphs from Gas drilling raises economic prospects:

Gathering the manpower and equipment to tap natural gas under the Southern Tier will continue for months and years as companies recruit qualified help for jobs ranging from land prospecting to drilling, industry sources said.

Some jobs, such as clerical help to process land deals and laborers laying pipe to carry the gas, will be local. Others, like specialized teams operating drilling rigs, will likely be brought from out of the area.

Until recently, low natural gas prices and technological limits caused a lull in the industry regionally, said Brad Gill, a spokesman for the Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York. A drop in gas prices below $3 per 1,000 cubic feet in the late 1980s and through the 1990s “decimated our industry,” he said. Consequently, prospecting slowed, infrastructure development lagged and jobs dwindled.

Prices have since more than tripled, and new technology and current geological models have led to a rush to tap the Marcellus Shale formation. It’s the largest untapped natural gas reserve in the country and it extends under the Southern Tier and Pennsylvania.

Everything is suddenly changing, as companies race to catch up.

The article goes on to say that one energy company, XTO Energy of Fort Worth, TX, is about to sign a land deal with 300 local landowners in the Deposit, NY area worth $90M! Wow. And this is just the beginning. Maybe happy (economic) days are returning to our area! Too soon to tell. What we have right now are hopes that these prospecting companies will find some good veins or deposits. Perhaps the naming of Deposit all those years ago was a prescient act.

Let’s hope the socialist politicians in this area don’t tax the profits into the ground, and let’s hope the drilling companies start pulling natural gas out of the ground.

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