For the push to impose federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing, three possible motivations exist:
- The practice exposes subsurface sources of drinking water to risk and therefore should be regulated.
- An exemption from federal regulation of hydraulic fracing became law during the administration of former President George W. Bush and therefore must be presumed environmentally deficient.
- Hydraulic fracing is essential to unconventional gas resources and therefore should be resisted for its power to extend domestic supplies—and therefore use—of hydrocarbon energy.
Even as it fights political assaults on many other fronts, the US oil and gas producers must fight the developing siege on all three levels.
Limited comprehension
The first motivation is sound in its core assertion but limited in its comprehension. Education should represent sufficient response.
Hydraulic fracing does expose groundwater to risk. Politicians and their constituents just learning of the practice can find it alarming that producers pump slurries underground via wells penetrating freshwater aquifers. When they learn about proliferation of the method related to expansion of unconventional gas plays, they submit easily to fearmongering, such as that of Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).
“This is a very serious issue,” she said recently after disclosing that she and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) would introduce a bill repealing hydraulic fracing’s exemption from the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. “If it is not addressed, large numbers of people are very likely to suffer. Their houses will no longer be livable.”
In the absence of regulation, she might be right. What she fails to tell the people she hopes to frighten is that no such regulatory deficiency looms. State and local governments regulate injection of frac and drilling fluids. They apparently do so well. In more than half a century of underground fluid injection, no major contamination of drinking water has occurred.
In 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency published results of a comprehensive study of underground injection of frac fluids into coalbed methane wells, concluding that the practice “poses minimal threat to [underground sources of drinking water].” Earlier this year, the Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission, comprising state regulators, passed a resolution supporting the exemption of hydraulic fracing from federal regulation.
In 2002, IOGCC surveyed member states and found no report of groundwater damage due to hydraulic fracing. In its resolution this year, IOGCC asserted that close to 1 million wells have been hydraulically fraced in the US since the method went into use more than 50 years ago “with no known harm to groundwater.” And last month, the Groundwater Protection Council reported findings of a study, funded by the Department of Energy, that found state regulation “are adequately designed to directly protect water resources.”
To anyone concerned only about the safety of drinking water, facts about the regulation and safety record of hydraulic fracing should quell pressure to add a federal layer of regulation. The move would be unnecessary and wasteful. But those other motives are at work.
It’s deceitful to smear hydraulic fracing’s exemption from federal regulation as a Bush environmental lapse. The exemption took effect in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was hailed by both major political parties as a triumph of bipartisanship. Since passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, the government never has seen the need to apply the law to already-regulated hydraulic fracing. Indeed, the study EPA reported in 2004 began not during Bush’s term in office but during that of his Democratic predecessor.
Raising cost
Federal regulation of hydraulic fracing would add unnecessary cost to drilling—the American Petroleum Institute estimates it at as much as $100,000/well. And it would give drilling opponents another set of legal and administrative opportunities to impede drilling.
Cost elevation and bureaucratic obstructionism serve the interests only of those Americans who want to abolish oil and gas in all its dimensions, in every way possible, and at any cost. Most Americans know those wishes are irrational and unbearably expensive.
Most Americans also recognize the dangers of misguided regulation. Federal regulation of hydraulic fracing would be precisely that.
