Officials with Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources were quite surprised last week when natural gas drillers bid twice as much as expected — $128.5 million, or more than $4,000 per acre — for leases on state-owned land. With those leases, the drillers hope to tap into one of America’s greatest natural resources, the Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit that stretches from New York through Pennsylvania and into West Virginia.

As the world’s largest known natural gas reserve, the Marcellus Shale deposit is estimated to hold as much as 480 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The U.S. currently uses about 23 trillion cubic feet of odorless, colorless natural gas annually to produce a quarter of the nation’s total energy needs. Development of just the Pennsylvania portion of the Marcellus Shale deposit would generate up to $13.5 billion in new tax revenues, while generating almost 175,000 new jobs, according to a study by the Penn State University Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering.