The State of Wyoming announced this week that the EPA would set aside its report on hydraulic fracturing and water contamination released to the public without peer review on December 8, 2011. The report on Pavillion, Wyoming water contamination was the first time the EPA had implied contaminated water was the result of hydraulic fracturing.
The EPA’s decision to pull its report comes after State experts, other federal agencies, and industry had criticized the EPA’s drilling plan and testing procedures.
Congressional Western Caucus Chairman Steve Pearce issued a statement saying he was “…glad to see that two years later, the EPA has finally given up on this preposterous report that claimed hydraulic fracturing was the cause of contaminated groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming.”
Pearce said, “Both former Obama administration EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and BLM Director Bob Abbey have stated that hydraulic fracturing has not been proven to have led to one single case of contaminated groundwater, and it is my hope that the EPA will learn from their mistake of premature accusations. Releasing a report without peer review is never a good practice, and if it weren’t for the hard work from Wyoming Congressional delegation and Governor Matt Mead, we might still be held victim to EPA’s far-fetched allegations about the hydraulic fracturing industry.”
Pearce urged that the EPA to “be far more thorough with their investigations when releasing future reports with tremendous consequences.”
While Hollywood has portrayed hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a dangerous practice that that is unhealthy, will destroy water supplies, proponents of fracking have hailed it as a major development in the energy industry, one that has allowed for tapping of reserves of gas and oil that were previously prohibitively difficult to reach. In some parts of the country, most notably in North Dakota, this has lead to massive expansions of energy production, and gold rush level increases in economic activity, according to the American Enterprise Institute.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is more commonly called, is a process that’s been used to extract oil and natural gas since it was first introduced by Standard Oil in the 1940s. Over the past decade, as other technologies have combined with the use of fracking to make the tapping of shale profitable, it has contributed to a resurgence of oil production in the USA and a dramatic increase in natural gas production.