Law-310 Week 3
Course Project Deliverable
State the primary legal issues raised by hydraulic fracturing; (Edwards, Shepherd, & Deutsch, 2011)
Historically, the EPA has not regulated oil and gas operations or hydraulic fracturing however recently due to mounting environmental concerns they are looking into regulating Hydraulic fracturing. The problem comes because fracking underground injections was excluded from the Clean Water Act but the EPA stated that any company using the method of Hydraulic fracturing with diesel fuel is regulated under the Underground Inspection Control program.
Also the Hydraulic Fracturing fluids are usually proprietary; companies spend millions on research and development of these agents and the EPA wants them to disclose to the world how they concocted these fluids. This was a real problem for big business fracking since apparently even the vendors who sales the ingredients for fracking is also a trade secret. No company wants to give up their secrets which in turn affect the bottom line.
State the primary environmental issues raised by hydraulic fracturing (EPA's Study of Hydraulic Fracturing and Its Potential Impact on Drinking Water Resources, 2012)
Hydraulic Fracturing seems to bring enormous expectation to the world’s energy independence, although at the same time it presents difficult and often unparalleled legal issues across the board, from ownership concerns to environmental law issues, to who is supposed to regulate it, for these reasons it’s become a national concern.
I think the primary issue however is the one raised by environmental groups how hydraulic fracturing can lead to the contamination of massive amounts of the ground water. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency fracturing method needs between 2.3 million and 3.8 million gallons of water per well, the problem is that much of the fluid that is injected is either not recovered or is unfit to use again which is then disposed