By Richard Martin, Contributing Editor
 
Last week the long simmering issue of “fracking” – using hydraulic pressure to fracture natural-gas-bearing rock – hit the headlines again, as Colorado Rep. U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (pictured) renewed her push to enact new federal regulations  empower the EPA to oversee the widespread practice.

In a June 4 Washington D.C. hearing that got “testy,”according to The Denver Post, lawmakers grilled industry officials about the recent rash of scary reports surrounding the chemicals involved in the fracking process. Officials fired back that adding federal regs on top of the state oversight that already exists will hamstrung the gas boom that, until last fall, had brought prosperity to many downtrodden areas of the Rockies and could help limit America’s dependence on dirty coal and imported oil.

Fracking involves pumping huge amounts of liquid – chemical-laced water, for the most part – into gas-bearing deposits to create tiny fractures in the rock, thus allowing gas to be pumped to the surface. (The industry spells it “fracing”; I’m using the more common “fracking,” because, well, I’m an editor and the industry version looks like “racing” with an “f”.) In 2005 Congress, under pressure from the industry, exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Now, “after nearly eight years of some of the most intense oil and gas development ever recorded in the American West,” Newsweek reported, “concerns over the environmental and health impacts are bubbling over.”

DeGette plans to re-introduce her legislation as early as next week. It’s natural that a Democratic Congress would feel motivated to protect the environment, and the citizenry, from the potentially damaging effects of millions of gallons of possibly toxic fluid being pumped into the ground, not just in the West but across parts of the East and Southeast as well. But before they add to the growing list of oversight missions at the EPA, the legislators might want to actually consider what the industry has to say about the practice.

For one thing, fracking went on for decades without much of a peep, or much evidence that it’s harmful. Around 35,000 wells are fracked each year, and the EPA itself reported in 2004 that no further regulation was needed. Gas producers point out that the fluid is pumped to immense depths, often thousands of feet underground, and that aquifers tend to lie much higher, separated from the gas deposits by dense rock strata.

In one widely reported case, a Grand Junction woman who suffered chemical poisoning related to fracking was exposed not by some flaw in the process itself but by a gasfield worker who checked into the E.R. where she works as a nurse. Environmentalists should also consider which poison they’re willing to swallow. Fracking may or may not be a questionable method that requires further oversight from the federal government. What’s unquestionable is that gas is a far cleaner option for producing electricity than coal, which emits about twice as much carbon into the atmosphere. New industry estimates say that the U.S. could be sitting atop a sea of natural gas – possibly “more than 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be pumped,” reports The Wall Street Journal in a long feature on the huge Haynesville Shale deposit, in Louisiana.

Tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who’s become something of a tribune for outsized energy schemes, has begun pushing for cars converted to run on natural gas rather than petroleum-based gas. It’s ridiculous, says Pickens – who made his fortune in oil – that the U.S. imports billions of gallons of foreign oil a year while huge reservoirs of a cleaner fuel lay within our borders.

There’s a common-sense solution to the current fight over fracking. The industry could simply divulge what chemicals are added to the pressurized water pumped into gas deposits. Currently it’s not required to by law; but doing so could help answer critics of fracking while at the same time displaying a new openness on the part of oil and gas producers, not exactly known for their transparency. Halliburton executive Ron Heyden recently told the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission that such disclosures would be “much like asking Coca-Cola to disclose the formula of Coke.”

That’s ridiculous. No one’s gotten sick from drinking Coke in a long, long time. A more reasonable approach would be to demonstrate that the technology is safe. This is the perfect time to do so, as the economic downturn and the natural gas glut have forced a pause in the frenetic drilling seen in the last few years. “Let’s prove to everybody what we’re saying — that’s there’s absolutely no danger” in fracking, Colorado School of Mines professor, Geoffrey Thyne, told NPR recently, “but let’s do it in a rigorous way we can defend.”