The White House fracking regulations announced last month appear to curtail environmentally destructive practices while maintaining higher oil production with lower prices. In reality, the regulations, which go into effect June 24, only provide short-term prevention of serious damage. We will be dancing to the joy of cheap oil prices until the wells are drilled dry — as soon as five years — and could be facing earthquakes and drinking polluted ground water until then and after.
The Obama administration’s rules require disclosing chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, a process of drilling and injecting liquid miles beneath the earth’s surface to break down shale rocks used to extract natural gas and shale oil. Currently fracking fluid contains up to 600 hazardous chemicals. West Virginia reported more than 120 cases of fracking-related water contamination in the last four years alone. Larger fracking states like Texas and Pennsylvania have even more.
While the proposal seeks to bring transparency and safer practices to fracking, it maintains last year’s decision to allow fracking above the Marcellus Shale in the George Washington National Forest — with streams providing drinking water to 260,000 people in the Shenandoah Valley. Robert Bonnie, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, explained this decision as necessary because “the Forest Service allows fracking all over the country” and they “didn’t want to make a policy decision or change policy related to fracking.” That is complacency at its highest form.