Hollywood star Matt Damon takes on energy industry with fracking film Promised Land It has revolutionised the energy industry and created a production boom, stemming decades of declining energy output and dramatically increasing US production to nearly seven million barrels of oil a day - an 18-year high. But it has also become an environmental flashpoint, amid concerns about the possible contamination of drinking water supplies, fracking-related earthquakes and a lack of regulation and accountability. All of which means that Promised Land is expected to be to fracking what An Inconvenient Truth was to climate change. And before even hitting the screens, the movie has faced accusations that it is "anti-fracking," and yet another example of how Hollywood liberals have been hijacked by the green agenda. Matt Damon and John Krasinski star in the controversial film Criticism has been led by Michael Knapp, a real-life landman who also works for the pro-fracking industry group Energy In Depth. He feels cheated by Promised Land's creators, who he said made the movie in his home region of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, on the pretext that it would not cast fracking in a bad light. "They lied to us," he stated. Armstrong County has been home to a natural gas industry for decades. Our entire economy is based off oil and coal and natural gas. Now with shale gas drilling it's a huge thing around here. The vast majority of people support it. My company back in 2006 was a company of five or six people; now we have 100 employees," he said. Energy companies are spending billions of dollars on operations and offering generous signing bonuses. This isn't about rich people getting richer. These are people who are going to use that money to significantly improve their standard of living and spend it in the local community; buy a new car for the first time, put a new roof on their house. Fracking critics think we're going to kill everybody and poison the land, but we've been fracking wells here for 60 years. We have 14,000 gas wells that have been drilled here and have you ever heard of anyone having their water contaminated by a gas well? Mr Damon, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Krasinski, rejects suggestions that Promised Land is anti-fracking. "The point is that the movie should start a conversation," he said. It wasn't that we said we wanted to make a movie about fracking as much as we wanted to make a movie about American identity, about real people....about the country today. Fracking was perfect because the stakes are so incredibly high and people are so divided. It asks all the questions about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. Yet Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, the environmentalist son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, claims in a blog that Mr Damon was a little more blunt with him. He says that Mr Damon told him "Everyone knows that fracking poisons the air and water. We wanted to show how it tears apart local communities and subverts democracies and corrupts political leaders and eviscerates all the things that Americans value. The energy industry points to the fact that among the film's financial backers is the government of the United Arab Emirates - an OPEC member with an interest in steering America away from energy independence - as proof that the movie is biased against fracking. Deborah Nardone, director of the Beyond Natural Gas Campaign for the Sierra Club, one of America's leading environmental groups, told The Sunday Telegraph: "The film is not so much about the environmental impacts, but democracy and the right of a community to say yes or no to fracking in their back yards. There are many states that don't allow local control, so the natural gas industry has the ability to drill wherever and whenever they want. I think that what the film is ultimately hoping to be is an eye-opener. For people who have never heard of fracking before, Promised Land could make it a household word. The US government's Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of a major review that will determine the technique's safety and the lengths to which the industry should be regulated. What is happening in America could also provide lessons for Britain, where the government earlier this month gave the go-ahead for an exploratory fracking industry. "It could become the biggest environmental debate of our time," said Robert McNally, a former White House energy adviser. Hollywood is taking notice and the industry will have its work cut out for it to defend fracking.