Craig Leonard answered media questions about opposition to the extraction method - largely over environmental concerns - after speaking to a room of about 100 New Brunswick businesspeople and industry leaders at a speaker series hosted by the Saint John Board of Trade.

"We just simply don't see that there's a basis to ban it," Leonard said after his speech.

"The fact of the matter is that you can't place bans on things that have no proven linkage to the issues that you're talking about."

The government will host a public forum in Fredericton on Thursday to start the process of ensuring "the proper information gets out," Leonard said.

First Nations representatives and stakeholders from various sectors across the province have been invited to participate.

In a speech about the New Brunswick Energy Commission's report, Leonard focused largely on New Brunswick's potential for shale gas, emphasizing that more public education on hydrofracking is necessary and touting the economic benefits of a fully developed shale industry.

The government has estimated that, based on current projections, overall production could be valued in the range of $2 to $3-billion and royalties alone could amount to $300 to $400-million per year for New Brunswick. In the United States, fully developed shale industries in play of a similar size have led to tens of thousands of high-paying jobs for people in those regions and the establishment of hundreds of new companies, Leonard said in his speech.

A mature shale gas industry could create 9,500 high-paying jobs for New Brunswickers, a group of industry firms stated in a submission to the New Brunswick Energy Commission in April.

"The economic spinoffs are immeasurable, in reality," Leonard said.

Hydrofracking, or hydraulic fracturing - the industry's extraction method - is a process where a mix of water and chemicals is pumped kilometres underground into drilled wells to break apart shale rock formations, freeing gas to rise to the surface.

Conservation groups, pockets of concerned citizens and some First Nations communities have called on the province to ban the extraction process over concerns that it will damage the province's water supply.

At the end of May, Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, told the United States Congress that there were no proven cases of water contamination from the fracking process.

"I'm not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing," Jackson said to Congress.

Leonard cited Jackson's statement a few times to highlight the need for more public education on the issue.

"When the director of the E.P.A. in the U.S. was stating very clearly that she doesn't know of any situations that there's been a proven link between hydrofracking and any issues with water, that's a pretty strong message that people have to pay attention to, to understand that hydrofracking is not the high-risk enterprise that people are trying to make it out to be," Leonard said after his speech.

A 2009 report from GLJ Petroleum Consultants Ltd. estimated the Frederick Brook shale formation near Elgin contains 67.3 trillion standard cubic feet of gas.

Two companies are currently testing for shale gas in New Brunswick: Corridor Resources Inc. and SWN Resources Canada.

Corridor has plans to drill as many as 74 wells in Frederick Brook shale over the next five years.

SWN Resources Canada is one year into its three-year, $47-million plan to explore and to eventually drill on one of its 32 licensed sites across the province, in areas that have shown gas potential in SWN's tests.

The government has a two-pronged plan to move forward on developing shale gas: public education and refining the industry regulations, Leonard said.

"We'll obviously have to do a bit more work on the communications side to explain to New Brunswickers what the industry is all about, and just to basically refute some of the misinformation that is out there."