Krancer: Idea Fracking Polluting Groundwater Is "Bogus"

Scott Detrow

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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.

November 17, 2011 | 1:05 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

DEP Secretary Michael Krancer and Energy Executive Patrick Henderson compare notes during a July Commission meeting

More on Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Krancer’s Washington testimony, from the Post-Gazette:

“The myth that terrible chemicals are getting into the groundwater is completely myth. It is bogus,” Mr. Krancer told the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment. He said sand and water comprise 99.5 percent of mixtures blasted into wells to free gas from the Marcellus Shale.
Some congressmen, though, are concerned about what’s in the other half percent. Rep. Tim Bishop, D-N.Y., suggested it’s a “largely unknown cocktail of chemicals and pollutants” that the federal government has a role in regulating.

The hearing came three weeks after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to develop new rules for the disposal of fracking wastewater.