Fractured Appalachia – Full Length Documentary

MCROBERTS, KY.: A view of Main Street, with a gas rig visible on the hill overlooking town

For a century, central Appalachia has been synonymous with coal.  In the past few years, however, our area has emerged as a major source of another fuel: natural gas.  We live on top of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that could be recovered in the coming years.  In response, WMMT 88.7 FM, the community radio station of Appalshop, Inc. in Whitesburg, Ky., has produced Fractured Appalachia, a radio documentary that explores the issues surrounding natural gas extraction in our listening area of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia.

In this program, we’ll look at some of the many questions surrounding the arrival of natural gas as a major extractive industry in Central Appalachia.  We’ll hear about geology, about dealing with gas company land agents and lawyers, about forced pooling and escrow; we’ll also hear about the surface effects of gas explorations, the regulations that govern the industry, and finally, its effect on our economy.

Fractured Appalachia will air in full on Monday, January 30, at 6 p.m., on WMMT 88.7 FM, which also streams online at wmmt.org.  The series will also air in seven segments on seven consecutive weekdays at 8 a.m. on WMMT, beginning on Monday, January 30th and concluding on Tuesday, February 7.  Also, feel free to download and share this program from this website.

Support for Fractured Appalachia is provided by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In our first episode, we begin our documentary series by starting at the bottom, with the rocks underneath our feet. What exactly is under the ground of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia that has attracted all the attention? And how is it brought to the surface?

The first contact people have with the gas industry is often a meeting with a landman. Land agents, generally men, work for gas companies, usually as independent contractors. Their job is to get landowners to sell companies the rights to put in gas wells and pipelines.  This episode tells their story, along with advice for landowners who receive visits from these land agents.

In this installment, we’ll hear about both the importance and the difficulty of soliciting legal advice before signing a lease for natural gas.

In this episode, we’ll hear about the legal arrangements that govern the royalties that people receive from natural gas extracted from their land.  This episode focuses primarily on Virginia, but touches on issues affecting any community where gas extraction is occurring.

A gas rig in close proximity to private residences near Hazard, KY

In this piece, we look at how a gas well is drilled, using technology developed within the last five years, as well as some of the things that can then happen when a well goes in.

In this episode, we take a look at what regulations exist surrounding oil and gas extraction in central Appalachia, a bit of the history of how they got that way, and how these regulations are enforced.

So often, when a natural resource is being developed, we hear of a two-sided debate–it’s jobs versus the environment, and you can’t have both. In this piece, we want to look at this dichotomy as it pertains to natural gas development in the coalfields of east Kentucky and southwest Virginia.  Is environmental protection a roadblock to sustaining a healthy economy in central Appalachia?