* Germany is sitting on a gigantic gas reserve*

It's funny that you say that as it's weird that Germany would have coal, yet no natural gas while the UK somehow ended up with both, as did Pennsylvania.

NYS has a moratorium on fracking as the land with potential natural gas is also NYC's water shed, and even from a practical standpoint, the economic benefits aren't enough to pay for the filtering needed to make NYC's water passable if it's contaminated with the byproducts of drilling. Yes, NYC's tap water is de facto natural water. PA has fracking, but it hasn't quite made the state *that* rich.