Energy industry hits back at science panel critical of EPA fracking report ByKyle Feldscher
The oil industry is charging the federal science advisory board with playing to ideology instead of science in a new report that raises concerns about a study that says fracking is mostly safe
Energy industry hits back at science panel critical of EPA fracking report
January 8, 2016 5:29 pm
The oil industry is charging the federal science advisory board with playing to ideology instead of science in a new report that raises concerns about a study that says fracking is mostly safe for drinking water.
In a report issued Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board issued a 130-page report that took issue with a study done in June 2015 that said hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, hasn’t led to widespread impact on drinking water.
Fracking is the process of drilling into underground rock formations before injecting a high-powered blast of water, sand and other chemicals into the rock. That separates the rock and allows the natural gas within to flow out through the well.
Despite calling the EPA’s study “comprehensive,” the panel of scientists said its findings that there has been no “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water” was a vague statement that needed revisiting.
“The [board] is concerned that these major findings are presented ambiguously within (the study) and are inconsistent with the observations, data and levels of uncertainty presented and discussed in the body of the draft,” the scientists stated.
While the EPA was tasked with coming up with a national assessment, the scientists urged the agency to look more locally.
The scientists said the EPA needed to focus more on incidents in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Texas where fracking is “perceived” by the public to have caused problems with drinking water.
“These local-level hydraulic fracturing impacts can be severe, and the draft Assessment Report needs to do a better job of recognizing the importance of local impacts,” the report stated.
The board’s focus on perception raised red flags for industry groups.
Katie Brown, a spokeswoman for Energy in Depth, a research campaign by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said the members of the advisory board admitted the incidents they want the EPA to focus more on are outliers.
Brown questioned whether it was appropriate for the EPA to revise a study that was meant to judge systemic impacts on groundwater because of a few incidents.
“If we’re talking about ‘outliers,’ then by definition we aren’t discussing systemic impacts, ” Brown said. “SAB’s mandate is to provide objective guidance on scientific matters. That is wholly inconsistent with its key recommendations, which are based on how ‘hydraulic fracturing activities are perceived’ by the public.”
The American Petroleum Institute, in a letter provided to the Washington Examiner, told the EPA that the terms used in the original study were not vague, as the Science Advisory Board claims.
The pro-oil trade group said there is no evidence of drinking water contamination in any shale formation where oil and natural gas are being extracted. They added that if there was evidence of contamination, activists surely woul make a big deal out of it.
“There are no examples of systemic operational issues that result in contamination in any of these formations, let alone many examples of widespread contamination in any formation,” the letter stated.
The EPA, for its part, plans on taking the Science Advisory Board’s opinion into account when it considers revising its report.
Agency spokeswoman Melissa Harrison said the final assessment on fracking’s impact on drinking water would come this year.
“The agency uses robust peer review to ensure the integrity of our scientific products. We will use the comments from the SAB, along with the comments from members of the public, to evaluate how to augment and revise the draft assessment,” she said. “The final assessment will also reflect relevant literature published since the release of the draft assessment in June 2015.”
Harrison added that the EPA’s original study did include examples of fracking impacting drinking water, but said there were not many instances to cite. That could be the result of the relative safety of fracking or it could be one of a number of other factors, she said.
“The identification of impacts on drinking water resources may be limited due to the existence of few systematic studies or monitoring, the short time course of existing studies, the presence of one or more other potential causes, restricted information that is unavailable in the public domain and/or a true absence of effects,” Harrison said.