Gasland, a well-regarded documentary, highlights the dangers to groundwater aquifers caused by natural gas drilling. As Robert Koehler of Variety asserts, “Gasland may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what Silent Spring was to DDT” because it so effectively demonstrates and illustrates the horrific repercussions of injecting chemicals and extracting natural gas from underground shale—toxic water and poisoned aquifers. Visions of flaming water faucets and dying cattle, dogs, and aquatic animal and plant life make it clear in the film that hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” at least without effective regulations, may have catastrophic results for a region’s drinking and agricultural water. The film concentrates on the problem, however, without offering a solution other than perhaps eliminating hydraulic fracturing altogether.
Gasland begins from the premise that natural gas supplies in the United States are a virtual ocean in the shale basins of the East and West. The assertion from gas companies is that natural gas is good for the nation, for our economy, and our environment and poses no credible threat to drinking water because hydraulic fracturing, “fracking,” occurs deep under ground and is regulated by the EPA. Filmmaker Josh Fox, however, calls these claims into question by telling his and his region’s own “fracking” story. Fox first tells the story of his house in Milenville, PA, built in the 1970s near a stream connected to the Delaware River during the time when Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law. But the house is now atop the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, Fox explains, the Marcellus Shale Formation of the Appalachian Basin, and he is being offered nearly $100 thousand for leasing his 19 acres. The goal, he is told, is for Americans to adopt natural gas as the fuel of the future.
But because it is seen as such a necessary energy source, an energy bill passed in 2005 for Halliburton Technology, the source for some hydraulic fracturing technology, exempted “fracturing” from the Clean Water Act and local, regional, and national drinking water laws. The film explains “fracking” in detail, demonstrating that the process requires the use of chemicals such as diesel fuel, which contains benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene, and naphthalene, as well as polycyclic oromatic hydrocarbons, methanol, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, glycol ethers, hydrochloric acid, and sodium hydroxide. The process also requires approximately 7 million gallons of water each time fracking is used to drill a deep shale gas well. Fox attempts to talk to Halliburton—or any other company—about this process, including T. Boone Pickens. But none of the companies will speak with him, so Fox draws on the nostalgia that opened the film, providing memories of the stream near his house before the rush for natural gas as “alternative” fuel.
The images contrast dramatically with the 2010 context in which more than 40 gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania in a few months. The hydraulic fracturing process now is poisoning landowners’ water supplies. According to Fox, complaints are growing about wells going bad around the natural gas sites in Pennsylvania. A well explodes on New Years Day. Animals lose their hair and begin vomiting. A cat now refuses to go outside. Horses now have no good water to drink. One family complains that they can light their drinking water on fire as it comes out of the faucet. If they turn on the water, it could explode because it is contaminated with natural gas. Water produced from the fracking process has been dumped into fields and onto streams, poisoning water for humans and their animals and crops. Fox finds similar repercussions in Nebraska and Wyoming and Texas. Gasland reveals many of the disastrous repercussions of “fracking,” but as Sight and Sound reviewer Sam Davies asserts, “The effect is to leave the viewer with the disturbing sense of the sheer quantity of evidence amassed by Fox, and what Gasland has had to omit.”
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