Review: Gasland

In 2009, eastern Pennsylvania resident Josh Fox was approached by a natural gas-drilling company to purchase the rights to drill under his property.  Fox was offered $100,000 for his gas rights, but he was concerned about rumors of problems with natural gas drilling in other communities.  Armed with his suspicions, a wry sense of humor, and a video camera, he set out to investigate.

A little bit of Chemistry 101 is in order here—but feel free to skip to the next paragraph.  Hydrogen gas (H2) is the cleanest burning fuel because the only byproduct of its combustion is water (H2O).  But we don’t yet have a plentiful supply of hydrogen available to us.  Natural gas, primarily composed of methane (CH4), may be the next cleanest source, and it is abundant.  Unlike coal, natural gas burns without releasing mercury or sulfur dioxide into the air. Natural gas emits about half the carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution as coal because a molecule of natural gas contains only one atom of carbon bonded to four atoms of hydrogen.  Burning one ton of coal releases four tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since coal is primarily made of carbon.

Pockets of natural gas have been drilled safely in America for decades.  But rising demand for natural gas has drillers looking to less easily-recoverable sources.  A new process called “hydraulic fracturing” is being used by companies like Cabot Oil and Gas and Chesapeake Energy to extract natural gas that is bound up in the rock of a geologic formation called the Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York and Pennsylvania through West Virginia, Ohio and into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.

Hydraulic fracturing—also known as “fracking”—injects enormous quantities of water and a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals (including benzene and glycol ethers) under extremely high pressure to break up the underground shale formation and release the natural gas from the rock.  The gas is then pumped to the surface where it is processed, compressed, and then piped away.  Some of the water and toxic chemicals used to fracture the shale are pumped back to the surface and stored in open pits.  Thanks to the “Halliburton Loophole” passed in 2005 during the Bush-Cheney administration, natural gas drilling is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

In the film Gasland, filmmaker Fox travels to Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas to visit communities that have been impacted greatly by natural gas exploration and document the problems there.  A scarcity of clean water is one of the greatest problems in arid western states, so pumping millions of gallons of water underground is a huge concern.  Water contamination is another.

Fox visits several people who have problems with contamination of their well water, allegedly due to the fracking.  Hair loss in pets, headaches, and brain lesions are reported.  In Dimock, Pennsylvania one resident says “our water was perfectly fine and then, right after they started drilling, (there was) propane and stuff like that.”

In one of the most startling moments I have ever seen in a documentary film, Fox visits the home of a Weld County, Colorado resident named Mike Markham, who claims that he can light the water coming from his kitchen faucet on fire because the fracking near his home has allowed the underground natural gas to infiltrate his well water supply.  Markham holds a butane lighter up to the faucet, then slowly turns on the water.  The flame flickers, but nothing happens.  “Just give it a second here,” he says.  Seconds roll by slowly, and still…nothing.  It looks like a big anticlimax, then suddenly WHOOM!!  The kitchen sink explodes into a ball of fire.  Markham staggers back, laughing and brushing his forearms.  “I smell hair!” he says.

In one of the film’s most touching moments, Fox visits Wyoming cattle rancher John Fenton.  Fenton, the son of “old-time cowboys,” is eloquent and evokes all the ideals of the American West.  His property is surrounded by 24 gas wells.  Vapors from the condensate tanks are sometimes so bad that they surround his house in a brown cloud.  His wife, Kathy, suffers from headaches, dizziness, and a loss of smell.

Fenton shakes his head as he looks at his herd of cattle.  He calls his water “the damnedest-smelling stuff. (It) comes out different colors all the time … I don’t know how (the cattle) even drink it…We want to raise the best, most natural clean product we can raise … but if you’re breathing in dirty air and drinking water that could be tainted, what’s coming out in these cows?  You gotta be sure that what you’re putting in ‘em is as pure as it can be.  Cute as they are, in a year or two they’re going to be on someone’s dinner plate…We need to speak in a unified voice and stand up to these assholes.” 

I highly recommend this film.  Fox uses his sense of humor—and his banjo-playing—to make what could be a highly depressing film enjoyable and even funny.  You can order a copy online by going to www.gaslandthemovie.com.