Free Republic

Several Democratic senators said Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency should step up regulation of the natural gas industry because they are concerned that toxic chemicals used in drilling could enter the public water supply. In a Senate hearing, Democrats pressed the agency about the consequences of a fast-growing drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, that involves pumping chemicals and water deep underground to release gas deposits. “The industry has failed to meet minimal acceptable performance levels for protecting human health and the environment,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and chairman of the Water and Wildlife...

A new drilling technique is opening up vast fields of previously out-of-reach oil in the western United States, helping reverse a two-decade decline in domestic production of crude. Companies are investing billions of dollars to get at oil deposits scattered across North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California. By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day — more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now. This new drilling is expected to raise U.S. production by at least 20 percent over the next five years. And within...

Oil and gas service companies injected tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel into onshore wells in more than a dozen states from 2005 to 2009, Congressional investigators have charged. Those injections appear to have violated the Safe Water Drinking Act, the investigators said in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday. The diesel fuel was used by drillers as part of a contentious process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives — including diesel fuel — into rock formations deep underground. The process,...

Pennsylvania’s top environmental enforcement official said Tuesday that he is confident that wastewater discharged into rivers and streams by the booming natural gas industry hasn’t degraded the state’s drinking water. At least 3.6 million barrels of the ultra-salty, chemically tainted wastewater produced by gas drilling operations were discharged into state waterways in the 12-month period that ended June 30, according to records reviewed by The Associated Press. Drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians is drawn from those rivers and streams. ... The state set new standards in August governing discharges by any new drilling waste treatment plants, but...

The United States has ample natural gas supplies to provide the nation's energy needs for the remainder of the century. The problem is that much of the natural gas is found in deep shale formations several thousand feet below the earth's surface. Geologists have known for years that the natural gas was there, but no one knew how to economically recover it. That has changed with the use of modern hydraulic fracturing technology combined with horizontal drilling techniques. Wind and other alternative energy get most of the attention from politicians and the media, but producing natural gas by hydraulic fracturing,...