EPA Home » EPA's Study of Hydraulic Fracturing and Its Potential Impact on Drinking Water Resources » Hydraulic Fracturing Study - Draft Assessment 2015 
 
 The U.S. Congress urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water. This report synthesizes available scientific literature and data to assess the potential for hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas to change the quality or quantity of drinking water resources, and identifies factors affecting the frequency or severity of any potential changes. This report can be used by federal, tribal, state, and local officials; industry; and the public to better understand and address any vulnerabilities of drinking water resources to hydraulic fracturing activities. 
 
 See Assessment of the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas on Drinking Water Resources 
 
 Assessment of the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas on Drinking Water Resources (External Review Draft) - Executive Summary (PDF) (28 pp, 1 MB, 06-04-2015, 600-R-15-047c) In this Executive Summary of the HF Draft report, EPA highlights the reviews of scientific literature to assess the potential for hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas to change the quality or quantity of drinking water resources. 

 The Environmental Protection Agency’s long-awaited report on fracking dismayed liberal green groups Thursday while pleasing the oil and gas industry — the latest episode in both sides’ fraught relationship with President Barack Obama. 
 
 The study, more than four years in the making, said the EPA has found no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution from hydraulic fracturing. That conclusion dramatically runs afoul of one of the great green crusades of the past half-decade, which has portrayed the oil- and gas-extraction technique as a creator of fouled drinking water wells and flame-shooting faucets. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 The report also jibes with Obama’s global warming policies, which have openly promoted the use of natural gas as a more climate-friendly alternative to coal. But for both anti-fracking groups and the industry, it came as yet another example of Obama’s mixed messages on fossil fuels — from the same administration that has stalled the Keystone XL pipeline and pushed to wipe out the oil industry’s tax breaks, yet is also moving to open up much of the East Coast and the Arctic to offshore drilling. 
 
 “This study’s main finding flies in the face of fracking’s dangerous reality,” Rachel Richardson, director of Environment America’s Stop Drilling program, said in a statement. “The fact is, dirty drilling has caused documented, widespread water contamination across the country.” 
 
 Thursday’s congressionally mandated EPA report, a compilation of past studies, found isolated incidents in which water pollution was attributable to the use of fracking. But it failed to back up the idea that fracking poses a major threat to water supplies, contradicting years of activists’ warnings dramatized by images of burning tap water in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland.” 
 
 Those images have helped fuel a brush fire of grassroots resistance against fracking, a technology that has fostered energy booms in states like Pennsylvania and North Dakota while prompting authorities to ban the practice in places like New York state, Pittsburgh and even Denton, Texas. 
 
 Obama’s simultaneous embrace of both natural gas and an ambitious green-energy agenda has been one of the great paradoxes of his presidency — he has even lumped the two together under the heading of “wind, solar and natural gas.” 
 
 Marty Durbin, chief of the industry group America’s Natural Gas Alliance, described the EPA report as a sign of “real evolution in the president” when it comes to the economic and environmental benefits of gas. Still, Durbin was not prepared to declare Obama had become a complete booster of gas: “I’d hesitate to say that he’s either fully in our corner or working against us at every step.” 
 
 Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has largely followed the same policy as Obama, calling for curbs on methane pollution from gas drilling sites while saying the fuel plays “an important bridge role in the transition to a cleaner energy economy.” 
 
 Some prominent Democrats remain split, though — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rejected fracking, for example, while California Gov. Jerry Brown supports it. The debate over fracking has been especially loud in the political swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, where fracking has created jobs and brought billions of dollars in new investments but also burdened communities with drilling rigs and heavy traffic. 
 
 Republicans are largely united in supporting fracking. And they made it clear they’ll use Thursday’s report as ammunition to oppose even the modest fracking regulations that the Obama administration has proposed, such as restrictions on the practice on public lands. 
 
 “The administration should now reconsider the burdensome regulations it intends to place on hydraulic fracturing on federal lands, and should certainly refrain from any notion of broader federal involvement in an issue that states and communities are safely managing,” House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a statement. 
 
 “States have been effectively regulating hydraulic fracturing for more than 40 years and this study is evidence of that,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said in a statement. 
 
 A worker uses hand signals to communicate with a co-worker over the sound of massive pumps at an Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc. hydraulic fracturing and extraction site in Colorado. | AP Photo 
 
 Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the EPA report should help “keep the federal government out of the lane of states” in overseeing fracking. Congress prohibited the EPA from regulating most forms of fracking in a 2005 update to the Safe Drinking Water Act — a change that greens have labeled the “Halliburton loophole” due to the presumed influence of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. 
 
 Earlier this year, 10 Senate Democrats joined every Republican in voting against a measure that would have rolled back that loophole. The EPA’s latest findings on drinking water promise to deepen that divide within Obama’s party over how closely the federal government should monitor fracking at a time when environmentalists hope to corral new support for reining in a shale drilling boom they warn would put the nation on an unsustainable path of continued greenhouse gas emissions. 
 
 But green groups found reasons to welcome the EPA’s study, even as they lamented the narrow data sets it used and criticized the energy industry for fighting against a more complete analysis. For example, environmentalists hailed EPA for belying oil and gas producers’ frequent claim that no documented case exists of groundwater contamination linked to the fracking process. 
 
 In the wake of Thursday’s report, the industry is no longer “saying there’s no problem,” Natural Resources Defense Council senior policy analyst Amy Mall said in an interview. “Their message has shifted in a way that has to acknowledge there have been some problems found here.” 
 
 Thomas Burke, EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for research and development, denied charges by multiple green groups that drillers had deliberately stymied the study by withholding key data. The agency had “a generally very cooperative relationship with industry” over the course of its research,” Burke told reporters. 
 
 Burke also noted that the study, which remains in draft form while it awaits review by outside EPA advisers and a public comment period, was not intended to judge the effectiveness of existing fracking regulations or the value of new limits, “nor was it intended to be a numerical catalogue of all episodes of contamination.” 
 
 The study did, however, put Obama’s EPA in a spot it rarely occupies: basic alignment with a fossil-fuel industry that has long fought fiercely against federal regulations. 
 
 Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America’s Energy in Depth project, contrasted the EPA report with the public health-focused report that the Cuomo administration released to support the New York state fracking ban. 
 
 While that New York report was “complete invention,” Tucker said by email, “what we have here is a product from EPA that, while not perfect, acknowledges officially what most of us have known forever, which is that there’s nothing inherently unsafe about this technology. Far from it.” 

 EPA study reveals fracking pollutes water 
 
 Despite investigation weakened by oil and gas industry obstructionism, EPA confirms what communities living with fracking have known for almost a decade 
 
 Earthworks 
 
 June 4, 2015 
 
 
 
 Washington DC -- In a watershed moment, today EPA announced fracking does pollute drinking water with the release of the draft final version of its study of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas and Its Potential Impact on Drinking Water Resources. Congress commissioned the study in 2010 in response to increasing public questions about the risks posed to drinking water by the unconventional oil and gas boom. 
 
 In 2004, an EPA study concluded that hydraulic fracturing does not threaten drinking water. From that conclusion, Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The 2004 study was maligned within the EPA and by independent scientists. The current study was intended to revisit the conclusions of the 2004 study. 
 
 “Today EPA confirmed what communities living with fracking have known for years, fracking pollutes drinking water,” said Earthworks Policy Director Lauren Pagel. She continued, “Now the Obama administration, Congress, and state governments must act on that information to protect our drinking water, and stop perpetuating the oil and gas industry’s myth that fracking is safe.” 
 
 Through its own research conducted between 2008 and 2010, EPA knew fracking very likely polluted groundwater in Pavillion, WY, Weatherford, TX, and Dimock, PA. EPA’s conclusions in today’s announcement was based on new case studies and found several contamination pathways and vulnerabilities, including well failures and blowouts, toxic surface spills to ground and surface water, and inadequately treated wastewater. 
 
 One of the most important parts of the original study was to be “forward looking studies”: tests of wells before and after fracking to determine if it polluted area drinking water. These forward looking studies were ultimately dropped because industry refused to cooperate. 
 
 “Industry data and independent studies tell us that 1 - 6% of unconventional fracked wells fail immediately, meaning tens of thousands of failed wells litter our country. Despite industry’s obstruction, EPA found that fracking pollutes water in a number of ways. That’s why industry didn’t cooperate, they know fracking is an inherently risky, dirty process that doesn’t bear close, independent examination." 
 
 EPA will circulate this draft final to the study Science Advisory Board for peer review, and to the public for comment. Based upon that review, EPA will make final revisions to the study prior to final publication. 
 
 For more information: 
 
 Contacts 
 
 Alan Septoff, (202) 271-2355, aseptoff@earthworksaction.org 
 
 Lauren Pagel, 202-550-8960, lpagel@earthworksaction.org 
 
 Tagged with: water pollution, science, fracking, epa 

 Hydraulic fracturing has not caused any major harm to drinking water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded Thursday. 
 
 In what the EPA is calling the most comprehensive examination of existing data and science on the impact the controversial oil and natural gas drilling technique has on drinking water, it largely debunked concerns about extensive contamination of well water or other sources. 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 And while the draft report released Thursday is largely a win for industry, which has said for years that fracking is completely safe, the EPA recognized some “potential vulnerabilities in the water lifecycle that could impact drinking water.” 
 
 “EPA’s draft assessment will give state regulators, tribes and local communities and industry around the country a critical resource to identify how best to protect public health and their drinking water resources,” Thomas A. Burke, an EPA science adviser and top official in its research office, said in a statement. 
 
 “It is the most complete compilation of scientific data to date, including over 950 sources of information, published papers, numerous technical reports, information from stakeholders and peer-reviewed EPA scientific reports,” he said. 
 
 Fracking is the main force behind the oil and gas renaissance seen in recent years in the United States, leading it to become the top gas producer in the world and putting it on a course to top oil producer. 
 
 The process involves injecting water and chemical additives into wells at high pressure to break shale rock and unleash additional oil or gas. 
 
 The main conclusion of the nearly 1,000-page report is the researchers did not find that fracking has “led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” 
 
 But it nonetheless outlined situations in which problems could occur, like when the fracking goes directly into formations that hold drinking water resources, wells are not adequately constructed or wastewater is not treated appropriately before being discharged into areas where drinking water is drawn. 
 
 The industry took the report as a major victory. 
 
 “After more than five years and millions of dollars, the evidence gathered by EPA confirms what the agency has already acknowledged and what the oil and gas industry has known,” Erik Milito, director of upstream operations at the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement. 
 
 “Hydraulic fracturing is being done safely under the strong environmental stewardship of state regulators and industry best practices,” he said. 
 
 The report will become final after the EPA’s Science Advisory Board approves it, and it goes through a public comment period. 
 
 Green groups have long complained that fracking pollutes groundwater, drinking water and the air, among other problems. They point to research from Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico showing hundreds of instances of water pollution from the practice. 
 
 On Thursday, environmentalists focused on the EPA’s conclusions on possible drinking water harms, saying the study proves their arguments. 
 
 “The EPA's water quality study confirms what millions of Americans already know — that dirty oil and gas fracking contaminates drinking water,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. 
 
 The group also called out the EPA for the limitations on its study and called for more thorough research. 
 
 “Unfortunately, the EPA chose to leave many critical questions unanswered,” Brune continued. “For example, the study did not look at this issue under the lens of public health and ignored numerous threats that fracking poses to drinking water.” 
 
 The EPA acknowledged numerous limitations to its research, including insufficient data and other sources of water pollution.
– The EPA issued a major report today about whether fracking poses a risk to drinking water, and the main conclusion "hands a victory to the oil and gas industry," writes Politico. That's because the five-year study found no evidence that the practice has a "widespread, systemic impact on drinking water," reports the Wall Street Journal. The report, however, spells out "potential vulnerabilities" to water supplies caused by fracking, the result being that both sides are claiming victory. An industry exec, for example, says the report confirms that "hydraulic fracturing is being done safely under the strong environmental stewardship of state regulators and industry best practices." But the executive director of the Sierra Club has an opposing take: “The EPA's water quality study confirms what millions of Americans already know—that dirty oil and gas fracking contaminates drinking water," says Michael Brune. A blog post at Earthworks, meanwhile, calls the EPA's acknowledgement of risks a "watershed moment." In particular, the EPA says drinking water is endangered "when the fracking goes directly into formations that hold drinking water resources, wells are not adequately constructed, or wastewater is not treated appropriately before being discharged into areas where drinking water is drawn," reports the Hill. The EPA says its study will give governments, the industry, and local communities "a critical resource to identify how best to protect public health and their drinking water resources."