Just before the Thanksgiving break, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy gave a speech at the National Press Club explaining what the agency hopes to accomplish in the last few months of the Obama administration. During the question and answer session, McCarthy mentioned that the agency’s finalized groundwater study will be coming out “soon.”

McCarthy’s comments come just after Catalyst Environmental Solutions released a new report finding EPA’s topline conclusion – that “hydraulic fracturing activities have not led to widespread, systemic impacts to drinking water resources” – is the product of sound science. As the report explains, “if a significant correlation between impaired drinking water resources and hydraulic fracturing existed, EPA would have identified it; however, the results did not support this finding.”

Administrator McCarthy alluded to the EPA Science Advisory Board’s (SAB) recommendations on the groundwater report, which suggested EPA provide more details on how it came to its topline finding, but did not ask the agency to change it, despite the way anti-fracking activists may have characterized it. When speaking about the SAB document, McCarthy made a few comments that require a bit of fact checking and clarification.

#1. There’s no lack of data

McCarthy said at the event,

“And so, the challenge for us is to characterize what we know and to make sure that that’s not over-characterized as we know everything because our data is limited, and how we project that and clarify that in this report is what we’re going to accomplish.”

This claim that the “data is limited” has been thoroughly debunked in a dissenting opinion on SAB’s first draft recommendations to EPA, authored by SAB panel member Walt Hufford. As Hufford states, the data may not have been...