It was a nearly packed house at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Wednesday night.
The crowd was there for a screening of "Gasland," a documentary that takes a critical eye at the impact of drilling for shale gas. The event was also a fundraiser for the Texas Oil & Gas Accountability Project, an advocate for stronger environmental protections on drilling.
Filmmaker Josh Fox traveled around the country to document the environmental downside of drilling, focusing largely on the impact of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water.
It's not the first documentary to critique natural gas drilling but it's the one getting the most attention. The film won a Special Jury Price at this year's Sundance Film Festival. It will air on HBO on June 21.
"We were always after something that would have national exposure," Fox said at a pre-party for the screening.
Fox devotes most of the film to his investigations of people with contaminated water in his home of northeastern Pennsylvania and in Colorado and Wyoming. He made two trips to Fort Worth but the Barnett Shale takes up less than 10 minutes of the movie.
Nonetheless, local drilling critics expressed excitement about the film and its potential for getting their concerns about natural gas drilling more attention.
"The film tonight, I think, is really going to drive home that we've got some serious problems," state Rep. Lon Burnam told the crowd at the start of the screening in introducing Fox. The Fort Worth Democrat has long called for a moratorium on drilling until questions about safety are properly investigated.
Next month's HBO screening will be a big night for the film, Fox said. He also plans to hold more screenings around the country this summer and promised a theatrical release in the fall.
The image of a man lighting his facuet on fire is one of the most striking moments in the film but it's also been met with some questions about whether the cause is actually drilling-related.
You can see that unforgettable scene here in the film's trailers. :
-Aman Batheja
This is a tale of two compressor stations. As far as Rick Putchio is concerned, one of them represents the best of oilfield practices, and one represents the worst. Putchio is upset with the station that EOG Resources built within earshot of a house he owns in rural Johnson County, south of Mansfield, so much so he's created a Web site denouncing the Houston-based producer. That's one of his pictures above of EOG's Big Daddy compression station. It's out in the open with only a large noise barrier on the west side of the facility, between the five compressors and the nearest house.
Just down County Road 514 is a similar-size XTO Energy compression station. But XTO's compressors are housed inside a sound-insulated building. We drove by one breezy morning. The XTO station was barely audible above a stiff southwest wind, while EOG's mechanical whine could be heard at least a quarter-mile downwind. Putchio calls it noise pollution and says he has complained to EOG to no effect. An EOG representative said Friday that the company "addresses each operating site on a case-by-case basis to minimize the impact on our neighbors," but declined further comment.
Jim Fuquay
S-T staffer Jim Fuquay reports in Sunday's Star-Telegram that gas leases haven't been all fun and games for farmers and ranchers in the Barnett Shale:
As drilling in the Barnett Shale escalates, farm and ranch operators have to with the encroachment on their land. Is it a tradeoff worth making? "It's a huge subject of conversation" in agribusiness, a Texas Farm Bureau official says.
Ranchers Dick and Heidi Elkins (photo), on their property east of Eagle Mountain Lake, enjoy the benefits of being mineral rights holders. But they say they have to put up with numerous inconveniences, including pad sites, degraded views, and heavy traffic.
The story is in our annual Farm & Ranch Report. The section is also in early Sunday editions of the newspaper, available Saturday in grocery stores.
UPDATE: Click here to read the full report.
-- Scott Nishimura
