Frack Attack

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brune/frack-attack_b_680725.html

Fracking. It's a word you probably hadn't heard a year or two ago. This week the Environmental Protection Agency had to postpone a public hearing on the subject in Syracuse, New York, because of concerns that the venue might not be able to accommodate the 8,000 or more citizens expected to show up and voice their passions on the subject.

I've been in New York and Pennsylvania in recent days, and I know how important this issue is to people in these states and others that sit on what's known as the Marcellus Shale -- a geological formation that stretches north from West Virginia. In total, this shale contains what may be the biggest natural-gas deposit in the world. To extract the gas, companies first drill deep wells and then use a technique called hydraulic fracturing -- "fracking" for short. It's a process that injects, under high pressure, huge amounts of water laced with sand and more than a hundred chemicals into rock formations deep under the ground.

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But when I said that the gas companies are "out of control," I meant it literally. If there's one lesson we all learned from what happened in the Gulf of Mexico this year, it's that energy companies have to be regulated. There's just too much money at stake for them to be trusted to do the right thing on their own.

Thanks to the Bush/Cheney Energy Task Force, however, fracking is specifically exempt from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act -- what's known as "the Halliburton Loophole." Oh, and by the way, Halliburton, is one of three biggest suppliers of hydraulic-fracturing technology.

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