Meanwhile, PA DEP official “dispels myths” about HF, says fluids “can be found on the department’s website”
- “Hydraulic fracturing, the target of Fox’s documentary, has been used for more than 60 years without any reported cases of groundwater contamination”
- Top PA environmental official “dispelled myths that the DEP does not know what additives a company uses in the hydraulic fracturing”; “companies must submit a list of chemicals to the DEP, he said, adding that a list can be found on the department’s website“
‘Shockumentary’ about groundwater harms the real environmentalism
By Mike Cantrell
Tulsa World
9/2/2010
Josh Fox and his shockumentary, “Gasland,” have done great disservice to the legitimate environmental movement that most of us embrace.
His film about the “dangerous contamination from hydraulic fracturing” is nothing but distortion. Every instance he so dramatically links to hydraulic fracturing has been investigated by appropriate state and federal authorities (including the Environmental Protection Agency) and found not connected to this procedure.
Of course the agenda of extremists like Fox (and the political environmental groups that fund his work) is to end the production and use of fossil fuels. The vast majority (more than 90 percent) of oil and natural gas still to be found and produced in America must be hydraulically fractured in order to be productive. So to end or seriously curtail the use of this procedure would deprive our country of the energy we need.
Hydraulic fracturing, the target of Fox’s documentary, has been used for more than 60 years without any reported cases of groundwater contamination.
The primary reason there have been no reported problems with groundwater contamination from fracturing through the years is that states have instituted a rigorous regulatory regimen.
It is Fox’s brand of politically motivated, environmental extremism that produces work that makes it a challenge for those of us who, day in and day out, strive to ensure we have the necessary safeguards in place to protect our environment with safe practices.
“Gasland” is so off-base that it will eventually be discredited. In the end, scientifically sound, proven, time-tested practices, and effective regulation will ensure that our groundwater is protected now – and for generations to come.
Officials, experts discuss Marcellus Shale issues at public forum
By Mark Hofmann
Daily Courier
September 2, 2010
Alan Eichler, environmental program manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, discussed water quality, testing, disposal and DEP regulations.
Eichler dispelled myths that the DEP does not know what additives a company uses in the hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” process. The companies must submit a list of chemicals and their effects to the DEP, he said, adding that a list can be found on the department’s website, www.depweb.state.pa.us; click on “Oil and Gas,” then click on “Marcellus Shale” for that and other information.
Another myth was the 1,400 citations filed against the companies mean there were 1,400 spills. Eichler said one single incident can be a violation of several sections of law. He added that DEP has been citing the companies when violations have occurred and have tripled the size of their field employees as well as extended hours in evenings and weekends.
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Fictionalizing the Facts: Fox’s Flaming Faucets
By Peter Wynne
The Hancock (N.Y.) Herald
July 14, 2010
If you watch Josh Fox in his movie “Gasland,” listen to the narration he wrote and read some of the interviews he’s giving to the media, you’ll likely be convinced he was born among the green hills of Wayne County, Pa., and grew up in a little house on a dirt road in the middle of the woods. More than that, the house was built by his parents, who taught him his first word, “hammer.”
Fox gives out details like that and does it with seeming sincerity, but his heart-warming tale is mostly a fantasy, just so much bait to hook an audience and pull viewers over to his side. The movie’s straight-talking Josh Fox, who wears jeans and a baseball cap and finger-picks a five-string banjo, can’t be trusted to tell anything like the whole truth.
Fox is playing a role in his movie. Besides being a film director, he’s an experienced actor who eight years ago was already claiming he had appeared in more than 60 plays. He’s also a playwright with at least 16 stage plays to his credit. In fact, it’s in the program notes for one of those plays — in 2002 at the La MaMa ETC theater in New York City — that he mentions his acting experience.
In those notes, he also volunteers that he “was born and raised above 96th street and grew up almost entirely in Manhattan,” adding that he’s “a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Theater Arts.”
That doesn’t sound at all like the star and narrator of “Gasland,” and it’s because the Josh Fox of the film is basically a fictional character. His father does own a modest house on the unpaved John Davis Road in Milanville, and Josh no doubt spent some time there as a child, when he wasn’t growing up “almost entirely in Manhattan.” As with everything else in the movie, Foxed picks only the facts that help him win his case and fills the gaps with fiction.
Fox is a capable and well respected artist who works mostly in a tradition that can be traced back to the leftist propaganda theater of the Great Depression, things like Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock.” He clearly understands that audiences will view him and his crusade against gas exploration with far greater sympathy if he represents himself as someone born and bred in the countryside he says he’s defending, and not just some Upper West Sider whose parents were well enough off to have a rustic retreat for weekends and summer vacations.
He claims he refused an offer of nearly $100,000 as a signing bonus for leasing the drilling rights to the Milanville property. He says that in May 2008 he got an offer of $4,750 an acre on the family’s 19-1/2 acres, but offers of that much money just weren’t being made on properties in northern Wayne County at that time.
The Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance, whose members then represented something like 60,000 acres, was struggling to get high-bidding Chesapeake Energy to increase its bonus-money offer from $1,750 an acre. And large aggregations of property were attracting much higher offers than little stand-alone parcels.
The fictions aside, one of the gravest and most consistent problems with “Gasland” is the way Fox ignores the huge differences in geology, production techniques and government regulations that exist across our vast and diverse country. He lavishes generous amounts of screen time on things he observed in Colorado, for example, but very little of what he saw there is germane to Pennsylvania or to many other states.
He points out, for example, that gas wells in Garfield County, CO, are very closely spaced, and this is supposed to be a warning to the rest of us. But what he doesn’t say is the wells are spaced this way because natural gas in Garfield County is found in lens-shaped pockets of porous sandstone that are entirely surrounded by gas-free solid rock.
The only way to extract gas from these “lenses” is to drill into them vertically from above, and efficiently exploiting a gasfield of this type requires placing wells just a few hundred feet apart.
The Marcellus Shale allows — almost requires — an entirely different approach. The shale continuously covers thousands of square miles in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Here a driller can bore down to the shale, 6,000 to 8,000 feet below the surface, and then extend the wellbore horizontally for a mile or more.
The same well pad can be used for multiple wells that extend outward like the spokes of a wheel, and a single location can be used to drain the gas from beneath many hundreds of acres. Here well pads can be spaced thousands of feet apart.
Out West, Fox also found evaporation ponds, which are used there to concentrate the tainted water that flows back to the surface from a newly fracked well. The flowback or “produced” fluid is sprayed into the air so that much of the water it contains evaporates, reducing the amount of fluid that has to be trucked to a disposal site. This is a technique designed for remote desert settings and cannot be used in Pennsylvania; our Department of Environmental Protection won’t allow it.
An industry group called Energy in Depth has prepared a rebuttal to “Gasland” that runs to nearly 4,000 words and carefully details some of the dozens of factual errors and outright fictions that can be found in the film. It would make no sense to repeat them all here, when the reader can find the piece online.
One subject worthy of comment is Fox’s flaming faucets, which provide some of the most arresting images in the movie. These are kitchen faucets that spout flames because the water wells supplying them have become contaminated with highly combustible methane gas and someone sets it ablaze.
Fox filmed these scenes in Colorado and lets the viewer conclude that the problem was caused by gas drilling, as the homeowners interviewed seem to believe. The most dramatic sequence of the lot, filmed at the home of Mike Markham in Ft. Lupton, gets about 10 minutes of screen time, but there’s no mention that the methane in the water came from bacterial contamination of Markham’s well, which is what Colorado state investigators determined.
In any case, Fox’s basic goal in “Gasland” is to convince his audience that hydrofracturing, or fracking, poses a grave and imminent threat to the environment and every living thing in it — in Pennsylvania and everywhere else. However, fracking has nothing to do with methane in water wells, which is the product of “migration” or “seepage.”
Methane contamination of water wells can be dangerous, to be sure. A methane-gas explosion in Dimock in Susquehanna County at the start of this year blew apart the underground enclosure of a water-well system and left a gaping hole in the ground.
A recently drilled gas well was less than 1,300 feet away, and gas seems to have migrated upward from a pocket 1,500 feet below the surface, along the outside of the steel well casing, which seems not to have been adequately cemented in place. The gas then seeped through the ground to the well enclosure. At least that was the scenario suggested a month or so later by the DEP.
It should be pointed out, however, that methane seepage is nothing new in northeastern Pennsylvania. Francis Tully, a Thompson resident who drilled literally thousands of water wells in the region starting in the 1940s, says gas seepage is relatively common in our area.
In an interview published in “The Hancock (NY) Herald” in February, the now retired Tully remarked that in his time water-well drillers often found they could flare matches at faucets. Near Clifford in Susquehanna County, he said, nearly every water well has natural gas in it, and people drink the water there all the time without harm. (Clifford and Dimock are about 20 miles apart as “the crow flies.”)
Back in January 2007, a brief video of a flaming faucet in Susquehanna County was posted by a homeowner there on You Tube. That was months before any gas wells had been drilled in the county.
Images of flaming faucets can be frightening, even though they’re totally irrelevant, and Fox is hoping, of course, that viewers will associate the unsettling emotional experience he has put them through with the idea of fracking. If you look at the headlines showing up in the popular press these days, you have to admit his tactic is working very well.
If “Gasland” were being offered to the public as an artistic endeavor, a scary, apocalyptic cautionary tale, it mightn’t be too bad. But Fox casts himself in the role of a “gas-drilling detective,” a downhome journalist presenting his findings in a film documentary, but he cherry-picks the facts for their shock value and blends them with at least an equal helping of fiction. The consequences of this deception could be profoundly destructive and longlasting.
Peter Wynne, who’s also a native of Manhattan, spent many years working as a journalist in New York City.
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- In an interview with The Inquirer on Wednesday, [DEP secretary John] Hanger was harshly critical of Fox, whom he called a “propagandist
- Hanger dismissed Gasland … as “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.”
- Critics say Fox, who stars in his own movie in the style of Michael Moore, presents a one-sided portrait of natural gas extraction. Energy in Depth … called Gasland “heavy on hyperbole, light on facts.”
FLASHBACK – Sec. Hanger as CEO of top environmental group: “Since our founding by The Heinz Endowments and the Pew Charitable Trusts in 1998, PennFuture has changed the landscape in Pennsylvania for both environmental protection and the economy. … If we are to truly move our state, our nation, and our world into a new clean and green future and solve the problem of global warming, we know we have a long road ahead and many challenges to meet.” (4/14/08)
‘Gasland’ documentary fuels debate over natural gas extraction
Andrew Maykuth
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wed, Jun. 23, 2010
John Hanger might think twice the next time a documentary filmmaker knocks on his door in the state capital.
In a documentary about natural gas development that premiered this week on HBO, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the environment receives a decidedly unflattering portrayal at the hands of Josh Fox, who made the movie Gasland.
Fox portrays Hanger – a liberal who spent years in the mainstream environmental movement – as an equivocating tool of the natural gas industry. In one of the film’s signature moments, Fox pulls out a bottle of water he says was polluted by a Marcellus Shale gas well and challenges the state’s top environmental regulator to drink it.
A clearly uncomfortable Hanger declines. At the end of the interview – Hanger appears for five minutes of the 105-minute film – the secretary detaches the microphone from his lapel and walks out of his own office.
In an interview with The Inquirer on Wednesday, Hanger was harshly critical of Fox, whom he called a “propagandist.”
Hanger dismissed Gasland, which won a Sundance Film Festival award, as “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.”
Fox, contacted in New York on Wednesday during a promotional tour, shot back: “It’s John Hanger himself who’s dishonest.” He said the secretary was disingenuous to present natural gas development “as anything other than a disaster.”
The flap encapsulates much of the polarizing debate that has erupted around shale-gas drilling, which relies upon a controversial technique known as hydraulic fracturing.
Fox became interested in gas drilling early last year when an operator offered his family nearly $100,000 to lease its 19 acres in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the booming Marcellus Shale natural gas play. Fox sets out on a mission to expose the evils of natural gas.
Critics say Fox, who stars in his own movie in the style of Michael Moore, presents a one-sided portrait of natural gas extraction. Energy in Depth, an industry website, called Gasland “heavy on hyperbole, light on facts.”
NOTE: Click HERE to read the full Inquirer article on-line.
READ MORE
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http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-june-21-2010/josh-fox
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (June 21, 2010)
Stewart: “The industry itself has put out, they put out, literally, to debunk your film, it’s from Energy In Depth – EnergyInDepth.org. It says when you say there’s 596 chemicals, they say 12. … They say that fracturing was never under … [cut off by Fox].”
- Report: “Although the hydraulic fracturing industry may have a number of compounds that can be used in a hydraulic fracturing fluid, any single fracturing job would only use a few of the available additives [not 596!]. For example, in [this exhibit], there are 12 additives used, covering the range of possible functions that could be built into a fracturing fluid.” (page 62, report from U.S. Dept. of Energy / Ground Water Protection Council)
Stewart: “They say they were never under those auspices. They say in this document that they were never under the Safe Drinking Water Act – that they were always regulated by the states, and that the states have very strict regulations.”
- Fmr. EPA administrator (and current White House advisor) Carol Browner: EPA does not regulate – and does not believe it is legally required to regulate – the hydraulic fracturing of methane gas production wells under its [Safe Drinking Water Act] UIC program.” (letter, May 5, 1995)
http://mediacenter.tveyes.com/MediaCenter/39625/486371.5222/CNN_06-18-2010_10.34.28.wmv
CNN: America’s Newsroom (June 18, 2010)
- Energy In Depth: “Fundamentally, we’re talking about a process in hydraulic fracturing that’s been used now for 60 years. It’s been in commercial service for 60 years. It’s not new. It’s not unregulated. It’s not exotic…And as recently as a couple months ago, when the U.S. Senate Committee asked top administrators over at EPA if they could identify a single case of groundwater contamination associated with hydraulic fracturing, the answer was: Not one.”
- EID: “The interesting thing is that the gentleman that was in the film — in fact, being show right now with the flammable faucet — he’s from Colorado, and the regulators went out to that well, did their surveys of it, did their research, collected data and came forward with a conclusion that that natural gas was … naturally occurring. That report was widely known, and it was available before the movie came out. And I think if the director was looking to give an even-handed account of what was actually happening, the reality of the situation wasn’t reflected in that film.”
- Cont’d: “Hydraulic fracturing has been aggressively regulated for years on the state level. It was never covered under the Safe Water Drinking Act — Josh was misstating the facts on that one as well.”
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/23979885/detail.html
WTAE-TV – Pittsburgh (June 21, 2010)
- EID: “Chris Tucker … said ‘Gasland’ director Josh Fox ignored a scientific report that showed the gas in the water in the Colorado example was naturally occurring and had nothing to do with drilling. ‘The film director has that report. He had access to the report before he went there, but obviously that doesn’t make for as good a story, and so he decided to exclude that,’ Tucker said.”
- Reporter links to EID’s materials: “An industry group called Energy In Depth gave Team 4 the following web links as a rebuttal to claims made in the ‘GasLand’ movie: Debunking GasLand // GasLand Debunked (PDF)”
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Anti-gas shock-u-mentary makes nationwide debut on HBO – but latest version of the film no better or more accurate than previous cuts
GasLand director Josh Fox is certainly a busy man these days, but apparently not too busy to review a 4,000-word rebuttal to his film organized and sent around two weeks ago by Energy In Depth.
So what’d he think of the write-up? According to one columnist for a major national daily with whom we both spoke, Fox’s primary critique of the EID fact-check was that we had based it off an “earlier print of the film,” not the new and improved version purchased by HBO. The pay-channel iteration was going to be different, we were told — different from the film he had previously screened in dozens of cities, towns and villages all across the country. After all, it was an HBO product now. And certainly a network with more than 30 million U.S. subscribers couldn’t be expected to just run any picture show it got its hands on without conducting a thorough job of vetting and reviewing it first. Right?
Our curiosity was officially piqued. What would Fox decide to change? The possibilities were endless. He could decide to strike the portion of the film on Dunkard Creek, which even the local press in the area have derided as a “glaring error.” Maybe he’d decide to toss-in a quick mention of the report from Colorado regulators on the Markham well in Fort Lupton, which found the methane in the water had nothing to do with oil or gas development.
But then again, adding in that little disclaimer would sort of ruin the flammable faucet scene, wouldn’t it? How about that bit about the endangered species in Wyoming? That part’s factually incorrect as well, and easily confirmable as such. Would that segment make HBO’s final cut? EID had to find out – even if it meant staying up well past its bedtime to do it.
So we watched the film, again. And what do you know? Dunkard Creek’s still in there. And so is the flammable faucet. And so is the phantom claim that natural gas exploration in Wyoming is rendering the sage grouse extinct. Incidentally, if that’s true, someone should tell the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission. It might want to discontinue its sage grouse hunting season. Ditto for the mule deer. We shouldn’t be hunting endangered species.
So what did he actually change, then? In the final analysis, unfortunately, not a whole lot. Take a gander for yourself:
Previous version: “In 2004, the EPA was investigating a water contamination incident due to hydraulic fracturing in Alabama. But a panel rejected the inquiry, stating that although hazard materials were being injected underground, EPA did not need to investigate.” (31:32)
HBO version: “In 2004, the EPA was investigating water contamination incidents due to hydraulic fracturing across the country. But a panel rejected the inquiry, stating that although hazard materials were being injected underground, EPA did not need to investigate.” (30:17)
- Mercifully, someone informed the director that the 2004 EPA investigation in Alabama he cites in previous versions of the film did not actually take place. His new version for HBO excludes the mention of Alabama, but unfortunately still mischaracterizes EPA’s course of study in this area.
- In the new version, Fox says that EPA “was investigating water contamination incidents,” but then the agency apparently decided it “did not need to investigate” those incidents. Which one is it? Did EPA conduct an investigation associated with hydraulic fracturing in 2004, or didn’t it?
- Here’s what actually happened: In June 2004, EPA released the conclusions of a nationwide study on the relationship between the fracturing of coalbed methane wells and underground sources of drinking water. What did it find? “In its review of incidents of drinking water well contamination believed to be associated with hydraulic fracturing, EPA found no confirmed cases that are linked to fracturing …”
- More on the scope of research involved in the EPA study: “In addition to reviewing more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, EPA also interviewed 50 employees from state or local government agencies and communicated with approximately 40 citizens who were concerned that CBM production impacted their drinking water wells. EPA made a draft of the report available for a 60-day public comment period in August 2002.”
Previous version: “What I didn’t know was that the 2005 energy bill pushed through Congress by Dick Cheney exempts the oil and natural gas industries from Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Superfund law, and about a dozen other environmental and Democratic regulations.” (6:05)
HBO version: “What I didn’t know was that the 2005 energy bill pushed through Congress by Dick Cheney exempts the oil and natural gas industries from the Safe Drinking Water Act.” (5:03)
- Once again, kudos to Fox for at least having the decency to convert what was previously an outright falsehood into a respectable distortion for the HBO premiere. As conceded here, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains no such exemptions to the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Superfund law, or any of the other “dozen” statutes he cites.
- The 2005 energy bill does, however, contain language relating to hydraulic fracturing and the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Here’s what it does: It makes crystal clear Congress’s long-standing position that hydraulic fracturing was never intended to be regulated under SDWA, and further: that it’s best regulated by state experts and officials on the ground, and not by EPA staff in Washington, D.C. Is that what you would call an “exemption” to the law? Not exactly. It was simply a restatement of current law: how it is, how it was, how it’s always been. For the past 36 years.
- As for the claim that the Vice President of the United States “pushed” the bill through Congress, consider: The Energy Policy Act of 2005 earned the support of nearly three-quarters of the U.S. Senate (74 “yea” votes), including the top Democrat on the Energy Committee; current Interior secretary Ken Salazar, then a senator from Colorado; and a former junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. In the U.S. House, 75 Democrats joined 200 Republicans in supporting the final bill, including the top Democratic members on both the Energy & Commerce and Resources Committees. That’s quite a push.
Two minor changes; that’s all we noticed in watching the “new” version of the film on HBO last night. Of course, we did pick up on a few things we missed during previous screenings. For instance, Fox does an interview with one woman in Colorado, who coughs on camera and tells him that natural gas exploration is the reason “I’m never healthy.” In the next scene, she’s shown holding a cigarette. The woman also blames natural gas development for the occurrence of methane in her water well. For what it’s worth, Colorado regulators disagree: “COGCC sampled the McClure water well on 3/25/09. Sample results show naturally occurring biogenic methane gas in well and no impact from O&G [oil and natural gas] operations.”
Next up for GasLand? An encore airing on HBO slated for Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. EST. Check back at energyindepth.org for updates and additional points of debunkery from the film.
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