EPA Drops Action Against Range Resources

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.

March 30, 2012 | 2:52 PM

The Environmental Protection Agency is dropping an action against Range Resources in Texas. The EPA had charged the driller with polluting groundwater.
More from the Wall Street Journal:

The EPA was seeking to force the Fort Worth-based natural-gas exploration company to provide drinking water to affected residents and clean up the aquifer, which could have been very costly. The news came in a filing in U.S. District Court in Texas.
In 2010, the EPA accused Range Resources of causing natural gas to seep into water wells near gas wells in Parker County, Texas. Range and, later, Texas regulators disputed this finding, claiming the gas appeared to have migrated from a shallow rock formation that Range wasn’t drilling into.
The EPA issued a statement saying it would “shift the agency’s focus in this particular case away from litigation and toward a joint effort on the science and safety of energy extraction.”