Shale-gas exploration by state environmental regulators will start June 12 in Stokes County and next week in three other counties though no money has been earmarked to analyze the samples that will be collected, State Geologist Kenneth Taylor said Thursday.

The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources has issued two contracts worth more than $236,000 to Patterson Exploration Services, based in Sanford, to drill core holes in Stokes County, Laurinburg, Raeford and Cumberland County, with the aim of assessing what amount of shale gas resources might lie in those areas.

Confirmation by DENR of an ample supply of shale gas would likely attract oil-and-gas companies seeking to extract it by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the much-debated drilling method. Conversely, such companies would likely steer clear of areas where an assessment shows a scant amount of shale.

According to the contracts, Patterson Exploration Services has been allotted about $91,000 to drill a core hole about 1,750 feet deep on a sliver of property owned by Walnut Cove in Stokes County, in the Walnut Tree community. The site is about 2 miles north of the line between Forsyth and Stokes counties, in a neighborhood off Crestview Drive. Drilling will take 10 days.

Next week, Patterson Exploration Services will start drilling core holes at an N.C. Department of Transportation maintenance yard in Raeford ($45,000), an N.C. Wildlife Commission fish hatchery in Fayetteville ($45,000) and an N.C. Highway Patrol site in Laurinburg ($55,000). Combined, the three holes starting next week will cost about $145,000.

Russ Patterson, the company president, has been a proponent of shale gas exploration and was once a member of the Lee County Environmental Review Committee.

Former DENR supervisor George Mathis, now president of the nonprofit River Guardian Foundation, based in Raleigh, dealt with Patterson Exploration Services during the 10 years he supervised the unit that put out requests for proposals and awarded contracts.

"They were never successful in getting a contract because they were always too pricey," Mathis said.

A Patterson Exploration Services official referred questions about the projects to Taylor, who referred questions about the contract to DENR spokesman Jamie Kritzer.

Kritzer said that the contracts were "carried out by the letter of the law." They were advertised on the N.C. Department of Administration's website, as any other contract would be.

DENR's shale exploration project was not affected by a Wake County Superior Court judge’s recent ruling that temporarily halts the issuing of permits to oil-and-gas companies for shale-gas exploration. According to Southern Environmental Law Center spokeswoman Kathleen Sullivan, no permits are required for DENR’s core holes.

“They’re not extraction and production wells,” Sullivan said in an email.

DENR’s assessment process may start with the core holes but it won’t end there. The samples will need to be analyzed. And for that, state lawmakers will need to spend more money. While DENR’s Division of Energy, Mineral and Land Resources has been allotted the money for drilling and collecting samples, it does not have the money to analyze those samples, according to Taylor.

Conservationists opposed to the state’s march toward fracking question why taxpayers are footing a bill that should be picked up by oil-and-gas companies.

“I think it’s a ridiculous waste of money,” said Therese Vick, the N.C. healthy sustainable communities campaign coordinator at the nonprofit Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League. “This is the richest, most powerful industry. The state should not be subsidizing this.”

Fracking uses extremely high pressure to inject a concoction of water, sand and chemicals thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface to dislodge natural gas from shale rock.

Once the fracking creates cracks, the gas moves to the surface.

Most of the state's current information on potential shale-gas resources comes from the Sanford sub-basin of the Deep River geologic basin, an area that runs about 150 miles from Granville County southwestward to South Carolina, according to a 2012 report by DENR. New surveys are needed, officials say, because the current geological information is limited, based on data from old wells.

Current estimates suggest that in the Deep River Basin there are an estimated 1.66 trillion cubic feet of gas and 83 million barrels of natural gas liquids – the source for more than five years of natural-gas use.

Chatham, Lee and Moore counties likely have the largest reserves of shale gas, according to state and federal geologists, but some reserves may also exist in Stokes County. Current estimates suggest that for the Dan River-Danville Basin, which includes Stokes, there are 49 billion cubic feet of gas but no natural gas liquids.