HBO's 'Gasland' drills into drilling

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 but.

Trouble the waters

Fox begins in Pennsylvania, where he discovers a community whose well water went bad within weeks of drilling starting there. The director then journeys to Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, and finds one nightmarish scenario after another:

■ People who, by placing a cigarette lighter next to their faucet, can cause the water coming from it to explode into a fireball because it has been completely contaminated by natural gas.

■ People whose pets have begun to lose large clumps of hair.

■ People whose tap water is turbid and brown -- and who still are told by natural-gas companies that it's safe to drink.

Along the way, Fox explains how natural gas is drilled, through a process called hydraulic fracturing, which releases dozens of toxic chemicals into the ground. According to one person Fox interviews (an Environmental Protection Agency worker speaking without authorization), part of the problem is that the EPA is in collusion with the energy companies.

Advocacy journalism

Gasland is among a recent spate of advocacy documentaries that paint a borderline-apocalyptic portrait of modern life. If you've sat through some of these movies, like Food Inc. -- with its study of the industrialization of our food supply -- your inclination might be to tune out what the filmmakers are preaching, since there seems to be little in the way of a solution. You might also doubt a lot of the things that the filmmaker is saying. Not unlike Michael Moore, Fox is an unabashed partisan who uses shock tactics to build his case. With little in the way of on-screen sources, you have to take much of what he says on faith. (The film gives no voice to pro-drilling arguments, but the closing credits include a long list of industry representatives who declined to be interviewed).

Yet you need to watch Gasland and engage with the prickly questions it raises, if only for the chilling 10-minute section in which Fox visits Dallas-Fort Worth. He interviews Al Armendariz, an air quality specialist at SMU, who says that the daily emissions from the oil and gas drilling around Fort Worth are greater than the daily emissions from all of the automobiles in the Metroplex. (Armendariz is now the regional EPA director for Texas and neighboring states.) He also introduces us to Calvin Tillman, the mayor of Dish, a town in Denton County where 10 gas pipelines converge. Speaking about the natural gas that has been released from the compressor stations in the area, Tillman says: "Some guy is going to be cooking his hamburger one day and blow up the town."

Three years ago, at the height of the Barnett Shale mania, I signed a lease for the drilling rights for my house in the TCU area. Gasland doesn't touch upon the impact that the economic downturn had on drilling here, or the fact that there seems to be a lot less gas beneath our homes than a lot of people anticipated -- to do so, I suspect, would let some viewers off the hook, and that's not this director's style.

Instead, Fox reminds us that you can't get something for nothing and that even if we can't see it happening -- even if the drilling takes place in rural spots, thousands of feet underground -- it still affects the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink.

Christopher Kelly is the Star-Telegram film critic.

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