Environmental Groups Petition EPA Over Fracking Disclosure

• Susan Phillips
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  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Environmental groups from across the country have signed on to a petition asking the EPA to include the oil and gas industry in a national database of chemical releases. The Toxics Release Inventory requires companies to report the quantity of chemicals that end up in the air, water, land, landfills, and treatment facilities. Congress established the TRI in 1986 as a reaction to the 1984 Bhopal disaster, where a gas leak at a Union Carbide plant killed several thousand people. The TRI maintains a database on more than 650 chemical releases, which can be searched by zip code. But the EPA does not require the oil and gas industry to report their releases.
The Environmental Integrity Project submitted the petition with the support of 16 other groups, including PennEnvironment, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper. Environmental Integrity Project director Eric Schaeffer says the TRI is an important part of the nation’s Right-to-Know laws.
“That makes it easier for communities to measure the environmental impact of local industries, motivates companies to reduce their emissions, and gives all of us insight into how well our environmental laws are working,” said Schaeffer.
Schaeffer says the EPA estimates the oil and gas industry release 127,000 tons of hazardous air pollutants every year. These include benzene, xylenes, and hydrogen sulfide.
The Toxics Release Inventory is just one of several exemptions to granted the gas industry when it comes to environmental regulations. The industry is also exempt from segments of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. For more on those exemptions, click here.

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