A couple of years ago, filmmaker Josh Fox received a letter in the mail that suggested he had won a lottery of sorts. An energy company pursuing natural gas in rural Pennsylvania wanted to lease the rights to drill below the director's property. The 19-plus acres that had been owned by Fox's family for decades are above the Marcellus Shale, described as the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." The signing bonus alone amounted to nearly $100,000. All Fox needed to do was to sign on the dotted line.
It's an experience to which many of us in the Fort Worth area can relate. Tarrant County sits above the Barnett Shale, and a few years ago many of its residents were besieged by those same letters and phones calls. Signing bonuses escalated. Save for a few naysayers who warned of potential environmental damage, most people assumed there would be no downside to the drilling. The Barnett Shale represented what most of us spend long hours fantasizing about: free, no-strings-attached money.
Fox wasn't immediately sold, however, and he decided to launch an investigation. The result is Gasland, an exhaustive and eye-opening look at natural-gas drilling and its potential dangers that premieres on HBO on Monday night, as part of the network's excellent Summer Docs series. What gives the movie its charge -- and what makes it such essential viewing for those of us living in or near Fort Worth -- is that, like most of us, Fox knew little about natural-gas drilling before starting the project. (He's also a film neophyte; his only previous work is Memorial Day, an experimental art film about the Abu Ghraib scandal.) We share completely in his journey of discovery, and that journey isn't an especially happy one. Turns out all that no-strings-attached money is anything bu
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http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/06/16/2270477/hbos-gasland-drills-into-drilling.html#ixzz0r7jcAb24
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