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EPA Official Says Current State Oversight of Hydro-Fracking is Adequate In response to pressure from environmentalists and some lawmakers, an EPA official recently said that state regulators were doing a good job overseeing the hydraulic fracturing process used to extract natural gas from shale formations.
Steve Heare, director of EPA's Drinking Water Protection Division, told a reporter for Dow Jones that he hadn’t seen documentation of the process contaminating water supplies and that he had “no information” that states weren’t already adequately regulating it.
An official from the U.S. Geological Survey, Bill Kappel, said that wastewater created by the process, which in some municipalities appeared to contain higher-than-normal levels of heavy metals and radioactive material, was a concern.
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states have the right to impose their own regulatory standards on the treatment and disposal of wastewater. Heare said that the agency was not currently conducting any investigations into water contamination resulting from hydraulic fracturing operations. However, the EPA’s proposed 2011 budget would include $4 billion to study the environmental impacts of the hydraulic fracturing process. |
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