After over 45 Gasland Part II screenings across the globe, we’ve seen a lot of awesome activist t-shirts. 

I love them because they always reflect the distinct characteristic of the place we’re at and the people organizing there. One of my favorites is a t-shirt organizers from Denton, Texas made.

Organizers from Denton, Texas

It has a football player dodging through drilling rigs and says ‘Don’t Frack the Home Team’ on the back. But that’s exactly what is happening in Denton, where a drilling rig is right near the Apogee Stadium, where the University of North Texas plays.

And it’s not just the football field. In 2010, a drilling company drilled three wells right next to homes, a hospital, and a public park with a playground, forcing people to come together to form the Denton Drilling Awareness Group which has been fighting for more robust ordinances to protect health, safety, public welfare, and community integrity ever since.

DAG organizers at the Gasland Part II screening in Fort Worth, Texas

We’ve seen this all over the country. Rigs, condensate tanks and compressor stations right in people’s backyards, putting dangerous toxins just a stone’s throw or soft breeze away from families.

Below is a post from Adam Briggle, of the DAG,  reposted from his blog Drilling Denton that will show you just how close to home drilling in Denton is.

Frack to the Future: Why Are Drilling Rigs so Close to Homes in Denton?

Denton’s new drilling ordinance established a 1,200 foot setback between gas wells and protected uses like homes. But the future of fracking in Denton is going to be a story about gas wells much, much closer to homes than that. 

We first got a glimpse of our future in April, just a few months after the ordinance was passed, when a development was approved that would put homes less than 250 feet from gas wells.

Now the picture is becoming even clearer. EagleRidge is drilling two wells simultaneously off of Vintage and S. Bonnie Brae. There are some homes just 100 feet from the pad sites. Many more homes are just 500 feet, or less, away. The diesel engines on site are pumping out black smoke.

I took this picture down there as the school bus was dropping off children. You can see one of the wells (south side)  – there was another one, even closer, behind me as I took the picture. The future of fracking in Denton is going to look like this: polluting industries plopped right next to houses. And all the activity we are seeing now is just the appetizer for the rush that is going to happen when we really start exporting natural gas and prices spike. 

Here is the Railroad Commission GIS image for the wells. 

And just tonight, the Planning and Zoning Commission approved another project that will bring homes 100 feet from a gas well.

You might wonder how this could be when the new ordinance seems to make this illegal. The answer is that the 1,200 foot setback in the ordinance does not apply to situations where new homes are built around existing gas well pad sites. I don’t quite know why this is. It has something to do with vested rights…but it also just seems to be a terrible oversight in the ordinance. DAG recommended fixing this problem. But that idea didn’t get any play.

Most of the pad sites that will ever be in Denton are already platted and at least partly developed. And most of them are south and west of town where lots of our population growth is likely to occur. So, we are going to see more and more situations where homes are in very close proximity to pad sites where new wells will be added and old wells will be reworked and refracked for years to come. And none of this will be covered by our so-called current ordinance. 

We have learned that fracking and neighborhoods do not mix. But we are going to keep on mixing them. 

Some will say that this is acceptable, because those homebuyers are making an informed decision to move next to a gas well. But they are not. They don’t know it is coming. I have heard from several folks in the neighborhood where I took this picture, and they tell me that this came as a surprise. Some say they wouldn’t have bought homes there if they knew this was going to happen.

Oh, and readers of this blog won’t be shocked to learn that the people in this neighborhood do not own any of the mineral rights and, thus, are not making a dime from the drilling. Records from the Denton Central Appraisal District show that the mineral ownership of these wells is split between five owners in Dallas, Austin, Abilene, and Lewisville.

We’ll be posting a couple times a week here, sharing posts from folks we met on the road, updates from the subjects of Gasland and Gasland Part II and a lot of pictures and stories of things we experienced on the road. 

But we also want to hear from you. Send me an email at screenings@gaslandthemovie.com if you want to us to share your story. 

I’ve heard Josh talk about how scary and lonely it felt when the gas industry first came knocking on his door on more than one occasion.

But then a strong, passionate community rose up, and he realized that he wasn’t alone.

We’re all in this together. Our hearts all sink when we see families like the Fentons and Lipskys suffering because of drilling. Our spirits all rise when we see areas like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or Longmont, Colorado achieve a ban. And our eyes have all been glued to the battle going on in Balcombe, UK because their fight is our fight.

Tomorrow we’ll screen for the European Parliament, and it’s never been more clear to us how connected we all are. Walking down the street of Brussels we fortuitously bumped into activist from Bulgaria and New York. Talking to them, the similarities between the movements going on across the globe reveals a connectivity that transcends borders.

Below is a post we wanted to share from Frack Off, a group of activist on the front lines of the fight in Balcombe. They’ve shown an amazing amount of strength and tenacity that we can all learn from and take to heart in our own towns and cities because as they so perfectly stated, their’s is just one battle in a global struggle.

-Lee Ziesche, Gasland Grassroots Coordinator

The sleepy village of Balcombe in West Sussex has until recently not been a place you would associate with industrial development. The surrounding countryside is among the most picturesque you will see out of the train window on the line between London and the seaside town of Brighton. This has all changed since fracking company, Cuadrilla Resources, infamous for the earthquakes it caused when it fracked the first and so far only shale gas well in the UK, set its sights on the village. Cuadrilla wants to drill a shale oil exploration well in Balcombe, targeting a similar formation to the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, but at a much shallower depth.

When local residents realised what was happening the company mobilised its PR machine to win them over. However a public meeting in the village in January 2012 saw Cuadrilla’s management besieged by 300 angry locals, and the company have since avoided similar events. The company has pressed on and with all bureaucratic options for resistance exhausted, a call-out was made for people to gather outside the site when the first equipment arrived. So began the community blockade that has so far lasted over a month. People and groups from across Sussex and the UK have rallied round in support and it is now settling down into a war of attrition, similar to that which ultimately defeated plans for a massive road building program which threatened to carve up the countryside in the early 1990s.

While Cuadrilla have not published any estimates of how much shale oil there might be, a recent report by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) suggests there could be up to 700 million barrels in the Weald Basin, mostly in Sussex. Given the typical low total production of a shale oil well this would require around 5,000 wells to be drilled. In the Bakken these wells are now being drilled at density of 4 per square mile, with 1.8 mile long horizontals fractured in up to 40 stages along their length. but rather than a population density of 11 people per square mile in North Dakota, there are 1,100 per square mile in Sussex.

Across the UK a similar wave of unconventional oil and gas extraction is being planned, both Shale an Coal Bed Methane (CBM). As easier to extract fossil fuel resources are depleted by unsustainable levels of energy consumption the system is resorting ever more extreme methods to feed itself. As extraction effort grows the pollution, social disruption and the fraction of the economy that must be devoted to energy extraction are also increasing. Licences are also being given away for Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), an insane technique which involves setting fire to coal seams underground and piping the resulting gases to the surface.

Globally the picture is equally bleak, with extreme energy threatening to spread across the planet. Spare a thought for farmers in West Bengal, India already under massive stress from climate change and globalisation, where a huge wave of CBM wells are now planned. These unconventional fossil fuels are also extra carbon which we cannot possibly afford to burn and avert catastrophic climate change. This fight is not about any one technology or country, but about the whole future direction of human society. Will we descend into a extreme energy nightmare where we live, and die, in the shadow of vast energy extraction projects which mainly exist to feed themselves. Or can communities across the planet revolt against the horrific future that is planned from them and take a different course.

-Frack Off UK