Debunking "GasLand" But Understanding It, Too
By Chris Tucker, Spokesman for Washington, D.C.-based EnergyInDepth.org
Editor’s note: EnergyInDepth is a Washington, D.C. – based organization that provides information and educational programs on emerging policy issues on behalf of U.S. independent energy producers, and was invited to provide commentary on the current debate on hydrofracking for The Correlator.
History records July 11, 2008 as the date on which the price for a barrel of oil peaked at an all-time high of $147.27, but at the time, no one knew quite how high it would ultimately go. What we did know was this: The American people were angry, had plenty of questions, and wanted real, straightforward answers. It was a “teachable moment,” to borrow a popular term – and for the first time in a long time, we had in the public a captive audience interested in learning everything it could about where its energy came from, how it got there, and what could be done to help bring down the price.
Fast-forward 20 months. Today, the industry finds itself not with a teachable moment on its hands, but a lecturing one – and this, on a very different subject. Yes, the tragedy in the Gulf was extraordinarily rare. But with questions still to be answered on what went wrong, why and how, the same American public that demanded new access to previously locked-away domestic resources in 2008 now wonders in 2010 whether the basic mechanics of energy production in America are safe – certainly as they relate to offshore oil, but also in the way we produce onshore natural gas.
It’s within this space of uncertainty that opposition to a well-established well-stimulation technology known as hydraulic fracturing has found a home, and subsequently grown. AAPG members know well that fracturing has been around for more than 60 years, and that it’s considered the sine-qua-non of unconventional shale exploration today. You likely already know it’s been applied more than 1.1 million times since its introduction in the 1940s, and has never been credibly tied to the contamination of underground sources of drinking water in all that time. As geologists, you’re aware this record of performance isn’t a function of luck – it’s related to the fact that the formations we fracture reside thousands of feet below potable water supplies, with no pathway for the strata at bottom to communicate with the strata at top.
Certainly you know all this, but imagine what the American public thinks when presented with the following story: Something called hydrofracking is coming to a town near you. It involves the pumping of millions of gallons of water and toxic chemicals into the ground, right into your water table. The process requires a massive detonation of explosives to work, and has been proven to cause earthquakes in Texas. It was invented by Halliburton, and just in the past couple years -- aided by a provision that Dick Cheney slipped into an energy bill that exempted the practice from a host of important environmental regulations. No one regulates the process today. No one oversees it. Companies don’t have to tell anyone the names of the chemicals they use. And it’s polluting everything in sight – air, water, and land. It’s even responsible for killing a nurse in Colorado.
Previously a mythology one would find only on the most obscure Internet blogs, today this narrative has become part of polite public discourse, and is increasingly being used to inform debates over the future direction of energy policy. Everyone supports natural gas. Everyone understands the promise and potential of responsible shale development in formations from southern Texas to northern Michigan. Everyone lauds the jobs, revenue and security that these activities make possible. But is it safe? That’s the question that policymakers are wrestling with right now, and the answers they come up with may go a long way toward determining the extent to which the shale gas “revolution” is allowed to actually become one.
As a medium of communicating disinformation on the fracturing process, no single source has been a more effective channel than the HBO documentary GasLand. Released by the network in June, the film has quite rapidly elevated what was previously a narrow debate between industry and environmentalists to the national stage, with members of Congress regularly holding screenings of the film on Capitol Hill, and communities inundated with dramatic accounts of the process that would make even the most grizzled industry veteran stammer for an appropriate response.
The upshot? Legislation is currently making its way through Congress that would assign EPA new and unprecedented authority to regulate and restrict the fracturing process from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Visitors to the GasLand website are asked to send a letter to their congressman urging him (or her) to sign onto the bill. Those same visitors are then asked to sign a petition for New York and Pennsylvania calling on legislators there to impose a blanket moratorium on all activities related to stimulating an energy well.
Fictional though it may be, the film itself is exceptionally well done, the product of a director with more than a decade of experience creating award-winning avant-garde films and stage productions for audiences in New York City. In GasLand, the director steps out from behind the camera and turns it on himself, proceeding to take his audience on a guided tour of people and places throughout the country that he says have been especially devastated by the phenomenon of shale gas extraction.
The stories he shares are harrowing: From flammable faucets in Colorado, to horses and cats losing their hair in Pennsylvania. Along the way, we meet a host of people who say they’ve got bad water, bad headaches, and a bad feeling that hydraulic fracturing – which the director mistakenly characterizes as a type of drilling activity – is the cause of it all. No scientific evidence supporting these charges is offered. And no credence is paid to the state regulators and staff scientists who suggest that myriad others factors may be involved in contributing to their condition. In GasLand, the culprit is clear – and anyone who says otherwise is wrong, or worse.
Shortly before GasLand made its debut on HBO, Energy In Depth, an education and outreach effort created in 2008 by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, published a 4,000-word rebuttal identifying and correcting the myriad mistakes in the film. That document is available on our website, http://energyindepth.org. Of course, if you’ve seen the film, you can appreciate how much material we had to work with – from errors in describing hydraulic fracturing’s history of use, to the mischaracterizations related to its status in federal law, to the bizarre suggestion that it has forced animals such as the pronghorn antelope and mule deer to the brink of extinction in Wyoming (never mind they number more than people out there).
These are some of the assertions upon which the broader GasLand narrative is based; other inaccuracies serve to inject that narrative with just enough color to ensure the audience’s attention is kept throughout. There’s the statement that all fracturing-related solutions contain at least 596 individual chemical compounds – even though third-party observers such as the Ground Water Protection Council estimate this number is closer to 12. And there’s the declaration that wells undergoing the fracturing procedure require 1,150 truck trips to be serviced – without admitting that 80 percent of those trips are related to transporting water, or that the larger calculation assumes none of this water is being reused (60 percent of fracturing-related water is recycled in the Marcellus, with many operators recycling a full 100 percent).
Of course, those who would dismiss the influence of GasLand simply because it might not have all its facts right are committed a mortal error themselves. Indeed, what the film may lack in fidelity to the truth, it more than makes up for in fidelity to the raw emotion of the moment: the idea that oil and gas development is dangerous, that it’s largely unregulated, and that the science involved in brining natural resources to the surface is far more inchoate than we’ve previously been led to believe. That’s the message in the Gulf. And even though GasLand was finished up well before the events of April 20, it’s this same general sentiment that has allowed the film to flourish among its natural audiences, and find plenty of new ones along the way.
Where do we go from here? HBO recently confirmed that GasLand will be available to subscribers “on demand” until sometime in 2012, with the director recently confirming his plans to continuing touring the country in search of more stories to tack onto the end of the film. Of course, by 2012, the Marcellus Shale will have churned out more than 110,000 new jobs for the state of Pennsylvania alone, returning more than $1 billion in tax revenue to state and local governments. The timing of the film does not appear to be incidental to this phenomenon.
Ultimately, though, the debate over the safety and performance of hydraulic fracturing is not going to be won or lost on the basis of economic advance and opportunity alone. Having proved its worth to millions of Americans in traditional oil and natural gas-producing regions over the past three generations, our job now is to make that case to people and places that haven’t seen significant energy activity since the days of Edwin Drake and William Hart. As it always does, science will be the leading force as that debate picks up in earnest. And as they always are, scientists and engineers will be the ones called upon to inform it, shape it, and ultimately win it.