After sitting idle for two decades, there’s steam  billowing from the top of the big old steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio.

This does not represent a renewal of the steel  production that once created the Rust Belt. Instead, this is a product of a new  industry proponents say can be a game changer, not just for the depressed  Youngstown Warren area, but for the U.S. economy and the bigger energy game. It  is the exploitation of oil shale.

The former steel plant now builds things like  seamless piping for extracting the natural gas and oil deep underground.

There’s enough natural gas down there, some experts  claim, to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and completely turn around the  current financial state.

It sounds fantastic, but opponents call it a  fantasy. They claim big oil companies will ravage the land, contaminate  groundwater, even create earthquakes,  then pack up and leave once the profit has been exploited.

It’s a battle that has been raging for years. But a “new and improved” process for pulling massive deposits of fossil fuels from the ground in financially devastated  areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, is bringing a lot of hope to  communities where homelessness  and poverty run rampant.

In northeastern Ohio, oil companies from across the  U.S. are setting up shop, developing wells and putting people to work, trying to  get the oil out of the sedimentary rock.  The controversial process used to  get the oil out is called “fracking,” which involves a highly pressurized fluid  injected into the shale as a way to extract the fossil fuels caught between the  rock.

“Years ago we couldn’t figure out how to get it out  of there in an economical way, but somebody came up with a better mousetrap,” said oil analyst Phil Flynn of PFGBest.  “Instead of only getting maybe 10  percent of that oil and gas out of the market, now we get 75 to 80 to 90 percent  of that oil and gas out” he said.

The latest fracking process, which developers claim  is less environmentally damaging, involves a seamless pipe drilled thousands of  feet into the ground, which then curves horizontally. Water and chemicals are  pumped through to break up the shale. The water is then withdrawn, pulling with  it oil and natural gas.

Flynn, who is very enthusiastic when talking about  the possibilities of natural gas, said this can change everything, including  foreign policy. “We're the Saudi  Arabia of natural gas. This single-handedly can change the US economy” he  said.

The potential of 5.5 billion barrels of oil and  15-billion cubic feet of natural gas has companies like Exxon Mobile investing in impoverished eastern  Ohio.

“People who have opportunities in many other places  in the country or elsewhere in the world have elected to come to Ohio and seek  opportunity here, that tells me that people who are making very rational  decisions spending shareholder money are coming to the conclusion that this is  worth chasing,” said Tom Steward of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

The shale oil industry seems to have many heading  toward Ohio with dollar signs in their eyes. On its website, the Ohio  Department of Natural Resources posted this statement: “In the spring of 2010,  the Division started receiving a number of calls from landowners who were being  approached by land persons seeking to lease the Marcellus Shale and  subsequently, the Utica Shale beneath their property for oil and natural gas  exploration. We expect the permitting and drilling to the Marcellus Shale and  Utica Shale to increase but at a gradual pace.”

It’s too soon to say business is booming, but Tom  Humphries, from the Youngstown Warren regional chamber of commerce, estimates  more than 400,000 jobs could be created in the area from the shale oil  industry.

But extensive exploration of land and growth in the  natural gas industry will need to involve the federal government.   Proponents accuse President  Obama of focusing too much on renewables, like wind farms and low return  energy sources.

And environmentalists, like Tina Posterli from  Riverkeepers, said the industry’s falsely putting a positive spin on it. “The  gas and oil industry greatly exaggerate the benefits of fracking” she  said.  “They have these hopes of jobs, when the reality is they come into  communities, they contaminate the water with their process, they destroy the  land and people's properties and then they leave."

Posterli worries that concern over the economy and  eagerness to make money from fossil fuels will lead to bigger, long term  problems, like earthquakes and destruction of natural resources .

“Fracking is growing because there's this fallacy  that we can hurry up get in there and solve all of our energy problems through  this process and through getting there first."

An EPA report said the risk to groundwater is  minimal and that no earthquake has been definitively linked to fracking.

Still, for now shale oil is tightly gripped in a tug  of war with environmental concerns versus jobs and a domestic fuel source.

People on both sides are eagerly watching to see  what happens.