Republican Wants To Improve Pennsylvania's Fracking Disclosure Regs

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

A Republican lawmaker wants Pennsylvania to publish a list of the chemicals each well uses, during the hydraulic fracturing process.
Currently, drillers are required to inform the Department of Environmental Protection what chemicals they’re using. But that information stays stored in a DEP regional office cabinet, unless a person requests the list via a Right-To-Know request. This puts Pennsylvania behind other states with similar disclosure regulations or laws, as StateImpact reported this summer. (Since our initial report, Montana adopted similar disclosure regulations.)
The Sun-Gazette reports on the new bill.

State Rep. Garth Everett, R-Muncy plans to introduce legislation today requiring gas well operators to reveal additional information regarding the hydraulic fracturing process.
“What they will be required to disclose is what they put in their fluids with hydrofracturing,” he said.
Failure to provide such chemical data has long raised outcry from various citizens and groups, including environmental organizations.
The treatment information, Everett said, will be registered on the Groundwater Protection Council and Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission’s “Frac Focus” website.
In addition, the information must be provided to the state Department of Environmental Protection and posted on the DEP website when drillers submit their well completion report.

Editor's Picks