Increased sales reflect spending by landowners with leasing bonuses — dubbed "shaleionaires" in the report — and out-of-state workers paying hotel and restaurant bills.

Stewart visited a "shaleionaire", one of the local farmers who’ve hit the shale gas lottery, and then came back here for a primer on power-supply management and energy security.

Along the coast it's easy to spot the effects of America's oil and gas renaissance in new hotels built in the past five years (many of them now populated by itinerant oilfield workers), in the multiplying numbers of overnight "shale-ionaires," in rising home values, expanding car and truck dealerships, and effectively full employment.

What's brought about the change is that there's a new, unconventional process for extracting natural gas from shale, a dense rock formation two miles undergound. And if you're sitting on top of it, you may become a new American phenomenon: a shaleionaire.