News

With the Democratic National Convention underway, a couple of news outlets have reported on comments made by Trevor Houser, Hillary Clinton’s energy adviser, who said at a Politico event yesterday that Clinton would end the so-called “Halliburton loophole” for fracking. Houser went on to repeat a long debunked claim that has been pushed by activists:

“Congress stripped [the Environmental Protection Agency] of its authorities to protect communities under the Safe Drinking Water Act, something called the ‘Halliburton loophole.'”

As Energy In Depth has pointed out many times, Congress never “stripped” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of that authority – the EPA never had it in the first place.  You don’t have to take our word for it, either.  In fact, it was President Bill Clinton’s EPA Administrator, Carol Browner, who made that clear way back 1995. As she put it,

“EPA does not regulate – and does not believe it is legally required to regulate – the hydraulic fracturing of methane gas production wells under its UIC program.”

Browner added:

“EPA’s position is that the fracturing of methane gas production wells is not an injection operation subject to regulation under the Underground Injection Control (UIC) program.” (emphasis added)

Now, even though states have (and have always had) primary regulatory authority over hydraulic fracturing, this doesn’t mean that shale producers not required to comply with a host of federal laws. A report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in September 2012 shows that oil and gas ...