FrackNation

The shale deposits that lie beneath 34 states

harbor large reserves of natural gas.

Energy companies are digging wells across the country

in hoping to revolutionize our energy consumption.

There's also growing concern over one way they drill for natural gas.

It's something called "fracking."

The high-pressure pumping of water and chemicals

deep into the earth to release oil and gas.

It's been implicated with water contamination,

air pollution, health effects...

Now the debate has a new concern. The process may trigger earthquakes.

You put a match to your water and it went up in flames?

We are in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

My name is Phelim McAleer.

I'm an investigative journalist and I love it.

If you don't shut that off I'm gonna take it away from you.

Asking the powerful difficult questions is a great job.

Mr. Gore, will you correct the record?

I wouldn't do anything else.

I was a reporter in Northern lreland during the Troubles,

and later worked for the UK Sunday Times,

and then The Financial Times and The Economist.

Fracking is a huge story

because most people believed we were running out of fossil fuels.

But it turns out most people were wrong.

We came up with a way to tap

previously inaccessible oil and gas from shale rock.

In terms of a newfound source of energy for the globe,

this discovery that gas shales can be productive

is probably one of the most important step increases

in the amount of energy available to the world

that's happened in a long, long time.

It's just absolutely huge.

The combination of horizontal drilling

and hydraulic fracturing has allowed the world now finally

to unlock huge quantities of hydrocarbons

and provide cheap, abundant, reliable energy

to not just millions of people, but potentially to billions of people.

But despite all this good news, fracking is controversial,

mostly because of this man.

Josh Fox is a journalist and filmmaker.

According to Gasland, his Oscar-nominated documentary,

which also won an Emmy, fracking is a complete disaster.

It's polluting water and causing serious illnesses and deaths.

And, in the most famous scene in Gasland,

people's tap water bursts into flames.

Whoa! Jesus Christ!

Because of these claims, fracking has been banned in many places,

from Pennsylvania and New York to France and Bulgaria.

But it took me only five minutes on the internet

to discover this claim of flammable water was very questionable.

I went to a screening of Gasland in Chicago

to ask Josh Fox about it.

Excuse me, this is...

Not relevant? Josh Fox, the director of Gasland,

knew that one of the most dramatic scenes in his documentary

probably had nothing to do with fracking,

but decided not to tell his audience.

So I put the exchange on YouTube.

But before you could say "flaming faucets,"

Josh Fox got his lawyers to force YouTube to take it down.

I put it on another website,

but using a bogus copyright claim, he shut me down again.

This was censorship.

What was Josh Fox afraid of? What was he trying to hide?

I needed to investigate.

I decided to ask the public to help me make a film

that would tell the true story about fracking.

I went on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.

Folks with big ideas but not a lot of money

connect with people willing to fund them

for everything from documentary films to new technology.

Creators post a video,

pitching an idea, and ask for donations.

Anyone who likes it can give as much money or as little as they want.

This is a film about people and it will be funded by people.

It'll be funded by small donations from you and people like you

who care about the truth.

The response was amazing.

People from all over the world

were sending in $5.00, $10.00, $20.00.

In the end, well over 3,000 people chipped in.

Clearly, the truth about fracking

is something they wanted but weren't getting.

I went straight to the place that has been painted

as the ultimate environmental wasteland caused by fracking.

In tiny Dimock, Pennsylvania, there is trouble just below the surface.

Methane in some of the water wells, enough for ignition at the tap,

made famous by a scene from the documentary Gasland...

As I drove around, I could see no wasteland.

I did see beautiful farmland with rolling hills.

Were people here as unhappy about fracking

as the media and Josh Fox claimed?

There was the guy that knocked at the door, knocked on Esther's door.

Well, one day, a land man knocked at our door.

A station wagon came down the driveway that I didn't recognize,

and a gentleman came out and presented us

with a proposed lease for the property.

My grandfather has leased

when other companies have come along in the past

so we just thought, Grandpa would have done it, why can't we?

More than a dozen families in Dimock, Pennsylvania

have water that looks like this.

The water came out looking like coffee with milk in it.

Sautner says their water supply became contaminated

when Cabot Oil Company started drilling

and something got into their well water.

Our son broke out in open sores down his legs

from using the water here.

Our daughter had big sores of... eczema? Is that what it's called?

We shouldn't have to live like this. We're Americans.

We knew we had iron, manganese, magnesium, aluminum,

chloride, sodium, strontium,

barium, three different types of uranium,

two of them are weapons-grade.

And a host of other chemicals,

some I can't even pronounce the names of them.

The state agency ordered Cabot to stop drilling new wells,

and to deliver fresh water to affected residents.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection

introduced a moratorium, a ban,

until they could study the situation.

This meant no drilling by Cabot in a nine-mile box around Dimock.

So it just put a kibosh on everything.

We were 13 days out from having a permit

where they actually could come in and start drilling,

and all of a sudden they couldn't do anything.

But Cabot, they put methane in the water.

They polluted the water.

- No. - Allegedly.

Yeah.

The next residence here is Craig and Julie Sautner,

who have all kinds of claims of all kinds of chemical contamination,

weapons-grade uranium, etc., etc. In their well.

But they've never shown any lab data to verify it.

They just claim it.

Meanwhile, every well around them is active and online.

I began to suspect that Craig Sautner's claims about contaminants,

including weapons-grade uranium in his water,

were greatly exaggerated, or maybe even false.

Have you done independent testing yourself?

We did, way back, you know, maybe two years ago.

Two years ago we did some testing.

But that, you know, I don't think we've done any testing since that.

- Independent, you know. - And what did that show?

I can't remember what that showed.

They said, they said the test results weren't that bad,

but I don't know if the guy was testing the water,

you know, testing for the right things.

See, there's some kind of, they gotta test 'em,

test it a certain way, I forget how they said it,

but it was, uh...

I don't know how, I don't know how they do it.

Can I get a sample of your water to take to lreland?

Yeah, I'll give you a jug. I got jugs out in the...

But the water now?

I don't know what it looks like today.

I mean, she said it wasn't looking as bad today.

I mean, I got some, you know, it changes from day to day.

One day it will be clearer, and the next day it won't.

And Craig Sautner, who claims his water is muddy brown

because of fracking,

was only able to produce clear water when asked in front of a camera.

It does change, you know, from one day to the next.

So how can you trust a well?

You know, all of a sudden you get, say,

"Well, that looks okay but it does have a little bit of stuff in there."

Say, well, then that's fine to use,

and then the next day it comes out looking like this.

It's not due to the drilling.

There's always been methane in the water here.

We grew up on the farm, on the house down here,

and, you know, my grandfather drilled a well in 1945.

The day he drilled the well, there was methane in it.

I'll show you where the well is, that was drilled in '45.

- What's that? - That is the well.

- And do you still use it? - The only thing we use it for

is washing the cars or watering the garden.

Because it is so red with iron.

It has methane too, but the methane don't hurt you.

It's the iron turns everything red.

So, what's this then?

This is the second well that we drilled, in the 70s.

- And what's in that well? - Methane.

Iron.

Sulfur.

We still use it. No problems.

But the moratorium was not going to be the only problem

for the people of Dimock.

Now they were going to be served with a massive bill

for a pipeline that was supposed to solve a problem

that they knew did not exist.

The Pennsylvania infrastructure investment Authority

voted Tuesday on a controversial project.

They decided to give $12 million to build a water pipeline

between Montrose and Dimock.

It was a fiat. it was simply, "This is what we are going to do".

We reacted in anger. We were citizens of this community,

and you don't expect to have $12 million of the state's money

committed to a project that may or may not make any sense,