Gasland
Gasland
NR | 24 January 2010 (USA)
Watch Free for 30 Days

Stream thousands of hit movies and TV shows

Start 30-day Free Trial
Gasland Trailers View All

It is happening all across America-rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground-a hydraulic drilling process called "fracking"-and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.

Reviews
Evengyny

Thanks for the memories!

Acensbart

Excellent but underrated film

Mandeep Tyson

The acting in this movie is really good.

Juana

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

View More
hubermit

This movie is almost completely inaccurate. It makes fracking seem like an environmental nightmare, which it absolutely is not. Josh Fox cherry picked every piece of data the movie is based on. Almost every scientific claim made here was proved false upon further investigation.In the flaming water scene, for instance, those people have had naturally occurring methane in their water for decades. It's a well known phenomenon seen all over the world. All air and water quality studies in Dimock have shown that their air and water is completely fine.Everything about Dish, Texas was also fabricated. The woman who conducted the studies about the air and water quality was later shown to have blatantly lied about her qualifications, and to have fabricated numerous other studies. All follow up research conducted by the Texas EPA or US EPA found no significant difference in air and water quality from anywhere else in the country.The list goes on and on. This movie is a hoax to get people stirred up about an issue that's not really there.

View More
CorumJI

The mindless zombies supporting this twaddle are going to tell you everyone who debunks this crap is in the pay of someone with an interest in promoting fracking. They SAY you should just research for yourself, but they will then TELL you that anyone who calls them "fools" is just lying. Ask yourself a simple question: Are there not jobs to be had working for environmental organizations? Is there not a tremendous amount of money in the Green Lobby, as well? So don't buy their garbage that they are any more honorable and forthright than their opposition. They have money and jobs on the line, too. They have an AGENDA, just as much as the oil companies.And DO do your own research. Here's one from a site the anti-frackers deprecate as "in the pay of the oil companies"... http://energyindepth.org/Texas/flaming-water-nobody-acknowledge/Pictures -- yes, PICTURES from BEFORE any of the fracking was started showing that the groundwater there was ALREADY highly flammable... exactly as has been claimed by the companies under attack.

View More
Daniel Lopatinksy

Film maker Josh Fox embarks on a journey around America to revile the lies and corruption behind oil drilling. Big oil companies developed a horizontal drilling technique into shale formations known as slickwater fracking or hydraulic fractioning. Using this method they found a natural gas reserve that some experts call an ocean. The Shale stretches from New York to Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. In order to drill on peoples land the gas company offered to pay 4,725 dollars an acre of land. Josh had nineteen and half acres which came to nearly hundred thousand dollars. An offer that is hard to refuse. The thing about natural gas is that it is publicized as a clean burning alternative to oil and coal so why is it a bad thing to drill and use this gas to fuel America? And the answer is simply the process the companies use to extract to gas. The 2005 energy bill passed in congress by former vice president Dick Cheney exempted the companies from the safe drinking water act, clean air act, clean water law, superfund law, and nearly another dozen other environment protection ordinances. After the bill was passed 32 states are being drilled on. Using cheap methods and hazards chemicals, 595 to be specific, the first sign of distress to the populated areas was the contamination of their water wells. People became ill, and water started to bubble fizz as it poured out of the faucet. Residents who lived in the same area for over forty years started to experience this problem only after the drilling process. Another sign was animals started to lose hair, vomit and become terminally ill. The most astonishing thing was a family in Pennsylvania that could actually set their water on fire. Straight from the faucet with no alterations the slightest flame ignites all the water. After countless of visits from multiple scientists to test the water none put the blame on the gas companies. Some even went as far to say that the water is still drinkable. A spokesman from EPA, the environment protection agency, came out and spoke of a giant cover up the organization was committing. An unmoral vision from the society that must sole mission is to protect the environment. In Wyoming there is land called the BLM, bureau of land management. In other words this land is intended for public use. It is public land for you and I alike and to do whatever we please. Unfortunately it sits on huge shale which Dick Cheney acquired through shady deals. This marks as one of the biggest public land to privet hands transaction in the history of America. Even of all the chemicals poising people there still the factor of the dangers from drilling gas. There are countless of stories of explosions and fires. The heat alone evaporates the chemicals and people lose their sense of smells, taste, and develop aches and pains all thought their bodies. The process of urbanization requires the needs of raw material. As the population crows and cities grow, natural gas is just one of those factors that are inevitable. It is true that fracking is hazardous to the environment but it is a give and take relationship in order to modernize. If the government decides to power our electricity plants to supply us with the wonders of internet, light, and technology, natural gas will be a cleaner way to achieve that. My personal opinion is that technology will ultimately correct the problems with harnessing energy in a cheap cost efficient method. Just ten years ago phones weren't even built with colored screens. Now we can control the internet with a few simple touches on our smart phones. Maybe there will be a way to modernize the urban areas without all the harm of hydraulic fracking. Only time will tell. Josh Fox presented and excellent documentary that highlighted all the hazards of fracking. Unfortunately I felt he was a little one sided. He never explained more in depth of the positives the natural gas is allowing Americans. Never went into depth about actions gas companies went to control or regulate the process. He present very strong and well thought out arguments. Overall this was a great documentary.

View More
Spiked! spike-online.com

It's a 'game changer'. After years when America's reserves of fossil fuels have been dwindling, an enormous new source of energy has become available: shale gas. Enough exploitable natural gas - 1,000 trillion cubic feet - has been found under states like Pennsylvania to supply US needs for 45 years. In Europe, there are 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. No drilling in deep water, no nasty oil spewing out, and substantially lower carbon emissions than you get from burning coal. Isn't this good news all round?Apparently not. And there has been no higher-profile effort to present the good news about shale gas as a disaster than the documentary Gasland. The film starts at director Josh Fox's home in rural Pennsylvania. A gas company has offered him nearly $100,000 to drill for shale gas on his 19-acre property. That's a nice little payday for basically doing nothing. Should he take the cash?First, a quick explanation of what's different about shale gas. The existence of stores of methane thousands of feet underground locked inside rock has been known about for a long time. What hasn't existed until recent years is the means to exploit these reserves. A pipe is drilled into these gas-containing rocks, then charges are exploded along its length to open up the rock. Then, a mixture of water, sand and a small percentage of chemicals is forced into the rock to open up fissures and free the stored gas. The process is called hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking'.Yet what should be an interesting opportunity to explore some longstanding questions - like what balance we strike between the interests of a relatively small number of rural residents and those of wider society - is missed. It becomes a black-and-white tale of little people against malevolent corporations. By starting from his own situation, Fox might think he is providing human interest, but it felt more like he was saying: 'I've got this rural idyll, how dare you screw it up.' With his smug manner, I was less inclined to sympathise with Fox than fantasise about punching him.The possible problems associated with fracking represent a serious enough story without Fox reaching for hyperbole and scaremongering, but he does that anyway. By throwing up a few liberal dog-whistle ideas - like 'chemicals' and 'Dick Cheney' - Fox tries to turn problems with a new technology that need to be sorted out into a wider suggestion that 'fracking' is fundamentally unsafe. And hey, if you don't care about Fox's water, he throws in the idea that shale-gas drilling could ultimately poison the watershed that supplies New York and New Jersey's water. Scary enough for you now?It would be naive to ignore the fact that energy companies have a trillion-dollar reason to downplay problems related to shale gas. But in many respects, that's as much a consequence of Americans' bad habit of solving every problem by litigation, and a wider culture of risk aversion where anything new is treated with suspicion. In principle, fracking is a safe way of producing energy. Where companies screw up, they should learn the lessons, clean up the problem and compensate those affected.What's missing from Gasland is the equally pertinent observation that environmentalists are desperately trying to find a reason to scare people away from a cheap new source of energy that isn't renewable or zero-carbon. If shale gas takes off, as it seems to be doing, the pressure from scares about 'peak oil' and the dangers of deepwater drilling for energy won't have the same purchase in the public's mind.As one analyst wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year: 'I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionise the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.'For Britain, this debate is now playing out closer to home. In 2010, test drilling started in north-west England on shale gas deposits there. With supplies from the North Sea declining and dependence on gas from overseas growing, a new domestic source of gas would be welcome. Yet there have been calls by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in a report funded by the Co-operative, to halt work on exploiting these reserves. (The Co-operative is also backing Gasland in the UK.)This seems mad, even in environmental terms. When UK carbon emissions fell in the 1990s, it wasn't because of concern about the climate, but because of the so-called 'dash to gas' as a wave of gas-fuelled power stations were built to replace coal-fired plants. Because gas contains a higher proportion of hydrogen to carbon, burning gas is regarded as 'cleaner' in climate-change terms. Encouraging gas usage would seem like a good way, therefore, of reducing carbon emissions while still getting affordable, reliable energy - something wind, solar and other renewable energy sources are failing to provide right now.Gasland has been nominated for the Oscar for best documentary, much to the gas industry's dismay. Rather like a previous winner of that award, Al Gore's global warming diatribe An Inconvenient Truth, Gasland cranks up alarmism at the expense of a balanced discussion of an important issue.

View More