EPA issues subpoena to Halliburton for 'fracking' data

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a subpoena to Halliburton for information regarding the agency’s probe into whether a controversial natural-gas drilling practice harms drinking water and public health.
 
Halliburton — already under heavy fire over its role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill — is the only one of nine companies that engage in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” that did not either fully comply with or commit to comply with the agency’s voluntary request for information.
 
The agency made the Sept. 9 request to the companies in order to work on a congressionally mandated study on fracking, which involves high-pressure injections of chemicals, water and sand to break apart rock formations and enable trapped gas to flow.

EPA is under a deadline to provide initial results of the study — which will examine the impacts of fracking on public health and drinking water — by the end of 2012.

Halliburton spokeswoman Teresa Wong said the company “has been working in good faith” in trying to respond to EPA’s “unreasonable” and “broad” information request and is “disappointed” by the agency’s decision to issue a subpoena.

“Because the agency’s request was so broad, potentially requiring the company to prepare approximately 50,000 spreadsheets, we have met with the agency and had several additional discussions with EPA personnel in order to help narrow the focus of their unreasonable demands so that we could provide the agency what it needs” to complete its study, Wong said in an e-mail. 

The company has turned over 5,000 pages of documents as recently as Friday, she said. “We are disappointed by the EPA’s decision today,” she said. The company, she said, “welcomes any federal court’s examination of our good faith efforts with the EPA to date.”

EPA is seeking information on the chemical composition of fluids used in fracking, data on the impacts of the chemicals on human health and the environment, standard operating procedures at their hydraulic fracturing sites and the locations of sites where fracturing has been conducted.

The technique has helped enable a boom in development of gas from shale rock formations in a number of states. But the boom is also creating fears — which the industry calls overblown — about contamination of water supplies.
 
House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats have also probed the practice and allege that drilling companies do not track whether wells are located in underground drinking-water supplies.
 
Two top Democrats on the panel, Henry Waxman (Calif.) and Ed Markey (Mass.), sent letters this summer to Exxon Mobil Corp. and nine other oil and gas producers saying they do not have the information the panel requested.