Since mid-autumn, gas prices in the Mid-Ohio Valley have been fairly stable...with prices in the Marietta area a bit lower than they are at stations in Parkersburg and Vienna. But events around the world, including continuing tension in the Middle East, have brought about predictions of $4 and even $5 a gallon gas later this year.

And in Washington Tuesday, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) heard a Canadian oil executive tell a committee hearing that oil from that rejected U.S. pipeline could be sold to china instead of America.

"We should be working with our friends and neighbors in Canada," Manchin said in a recent interview. "That's the friendliest nation we have, and our best trading partner. That makes no sense, that's thousands and thousands of jobs, and it makes us less dependent on foreign oil."

A Marietta College professor, who Tuesday night appeared on a panel discussing drilling in the Marcellus Shale for natural gas, is far more optimistic. He believes efforts to drill for oil across the country could lead to cheaper domestic gas prices.

"Just today, I think there was a deal announced between T. Boone Pickens and the company Navistar, to equip part of their truck fleets with natural gas engines," says Dr. Robert Chase, Chair, Department of Petroleum Engineering, Marietta College. "I think that's going to be a major boost, and that's going to curtail our demand for oil."

Meanwhile, Dr. Chase Wednesday discussed its impact of another shale system, the Utica Shale, with the Economic Roundtable of the Ohio Valley.

The difference from the much-discussed marcellus shale is that the Utica Shale is centered in Ohio, and, instead of natural gas, it's expected to produce oil.

"We anticipate that, over the next three years," he says, "we will increase drilling and see a thousand to 1500 wells drilled each year. And that can have a major impact on oil production in this country."