Three local filmmakers got an Emmy this week for Split Estate, their documentary about the health and environmental consequences of "fracking" — injecting chemicals underground to stimulate natural gas production.

Debra Anderson, the producer and director, and the two researchers, Mitchell Marti and Matt Vest, shared the award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research."

The award was announced Monday during the "News and Documentary Emmys" from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The academy's better-known "Primetime Emmys" ceremony was held a month earlier.

On Monday, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer announced the research award during a ceremony at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

Anderson, Marti and Vest attended the event, where the other half-dozen nominees for the research award were big-time productions that had aired on HBO, Frontline and PBS.

"I definitely was not expecting to win because the competition was intense," Anderson said. "So we were just enjoying the evening and we were completely shocked when they read our name."

The awards ceremony was taped for broadcast Oct. 9 on C-SPAN. Planet Green, the environmental network of the Discovery Channel, originally aired Split Estate last October, and will rebroadcast the 76-minute film at 8 p.m. MST Oct. 16 along with Planet Green's other Emmy winner, a nature film called The Last Beekeeper.

Anderson, a native of Colorado, went to the University of Colorado, then to graduate school in art at Hunter College in New York, where she began working in the film industry as a production assistant and editor. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, she moved to New Mexico "to get back to the West," and now lives south of Santa Fe off N.M. 14.

Four years ago, Anderson said, she began working on Split Estate — a title referring to the fact that most surface-rights owners do not own the mineral rights beneath their land — after reading about problems fracking created in Garfield County, Colo., near Glenwood Springs.

The documentary, which was financed in part by $19,000 from Gov. Bill Richardson's New Visions awards, was largely filmed near the Colorado towns of Rifle and Silt — where natural gas escaping from the ground as a result of fracking creates bubbles in a stream — and near the New Mexico town of Bloomfield.

Eight months after Anderson started working on the film, the story broke that Tecton Energy of Houston was looking into drilling for oil on 60,000 acres around Cerrillos and Galisteo — possibly using fracking techniques. "What happened was sort of a big surprise and coincidence," she said. "I wouldn't have known a year before what (fracking) meant, but I knew exactly what that meant when I heard about it."

Fracking involves deep injections of water, sand and chemical compounds called "surfactants" to break up underground rock strata so it releases more natural gas. Anderson said the petroleum industry won't say exactly what's injected, claiming that is proprietary, even though studies indicate these chemicals are harmful to health and the environment.

Anderson, who keeps her Emmy statue of a woman holding a globe at her home south of town, has begun working on her second documentary "on the topic of energy, going in a really different direction," she said. "We're not going to stay on oil and gas. We're going to expand significantly."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.