BICKLETON -- If you think the land is tough, try drilling below it.

A good 45 minutes away from so much as a gas station, this windswept landscape of dusty sagebrush and coiled rattlesnakes is hard.

But it's nothing compared to the rock below.

Down there, you're dealing with basalt that's literally hard as steel -- layer upon layer, reaching as deep as three miles. It's so tough that it eats tungsten carbide drill bits and chews up metal pipe threads.

"It's very slow drilling," says supervisor David Deans as he watches a group of roughnecks try to repair yet another bit at Delta Petroleum's exploration well. One man swings a sledgehammer to jar it loose.

No luck.

But somewhere under that basalt lurks natural gas that might -- just might -- make it all worth it. That flicker of hope explains a local rancher's dreams of riches, roadside spies, workers drawn from hundreds of miles away and an $18 million drilling investment.

"This is the old gold-fever problem in a different guise," says Ron Teissere, oil and gas supervisor with the state Department of Natural Resources.

Speculators, energy companies and geologists regard the Columbia River Basin as one of the highest potential untapped areas in the country for natural gas. They have for decades.

To date, though, the state has seen only one successful commercial natural gas operation, Teissere says.

It was early in the last century when entrepreneurs tapped relatively shallow supplies of natural gas beneath Rattlesnake Ridge, near Prosser, and piped it as far as the Tri-Cities. But the gas gave out by the early 1940s.

"That was sort of the end of gas production in Washington," Teissere says.

Companies like Shell and Chevron, however, kept drilling. It wasn't until the early 1980s that they managed to punch all the way through the basalt. They found some gas, but never enough to start the expensive process of production and distribution, Teissere says.

Currently, Delta Petroleum of Denver has the only active exploration well, also called a wildcat. The roughly dozen others that have penetrated the basalt are either idle or plugged.

Interest in the region has waxed and waned over the decades. The recent excitement is driven by rising natural gas prices and a mid-1990s report by the U.S. Geological Survey that claimed the Columbia Basin may contain 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Teissere says.

In 2006, Canadian company EnCana began drilling three wells of its own and announced the region may hide 450 trillion cubic feet. A trillion cubic feet can heat 15 million homes for a year.

Sure enough, the company found gas, but not "commercial flow rates," according to investor information on its Web site.

The EnCana wells, located near Mattawa, Beverly and Sunnyside, have been capped, but not plugged.

Meanwhile, just one of the last four federal Bureau of Land Management mineral auctions in the region attracted bidders. Energy company Trident has leased tens of thousands of acres in the basin but has not applied for any drilling permits.

Interest is already waning, Teissere says.

He may be right, Delta officials concede.

Delta's derrick sits on five acres about 12 miles southeast of Bickleton on Rick Gray's ranch.

Everybody is watching it.

Gray, who raises wheat and cattle, receives buyout offers and phone calls from other energy companies asking him about equipment he wouldn't recognize if he saw.

Delta officials expect paid scouts soon will show up on the county road outside their site with laptops, satellites and binoculars. It's par for the course. It happened at Shell's wells in the 1980s.

"There's not much ... you can do about it," says Broc Richardson, vice president of corporate development and investor relations for Delta Petroleum.

Delta's Gray Well may be closely watched, but it hardly makes a blip on the company's nationwide radar.

Delta has 2,500 development wells -- those considered a sure bet -- either drilled or on their way. Most are in the Rocky Mountains.

Overall, the company expects to spend $350 million to $370 million this year on drilling. About 20 percent of that is in exploration.

The Gray Well is the only one in the Northwest. It sits in the center of what the company calls the Bronco prospect, a 30,000-acre circle that geologists suspect might harbor natural gas.

The company originally looked at drilling another well about 12 miles south of its current rig, but they have let that permit expire.

Teissere figures about 600 oil and gas wells have been drilled in Washington's history. Only Rattlesnake Ridge paid off.

Drilling began at the Gray Well in mid-May. Company officials are tight-lipped about progress, but Richardson says crews are about ready to place the first casing, a section of pipe that holds open the rock while they narrow their drill bit to go even deeper.

"We could spend $18 million and find nothing," Richardson says.

But that hasn't stopped them from looking, no matter how hard the basalt.

* Ross Courtney can be reached at 930-8798 or rcourtney@yakimaherald.com.