The Environmental Protection Agency’s long-awaited report on fracking dismayed liberal green groups Thursday while pleasing the oil and gas industry — the latest episode in both sides’ fraught relationship with President Barack Obama.

The study, more than four years in the making, said the EPA has found no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution from hydraulic fracturing. That conclusion dramatically runs afoul of one of the great green crusades of the past half-decade, which has portrayed the oil- and gas-extraction technique as a creator of fouled drinking water wells and flame-shooting faucets.


The report also jibes with Obama’s global warming policies, which have openly promoted the use of natural gas as a more climate-friendly alternative to coal. But for both anti-fracking groups and the industry, it came as yet another example of Obama’s mixed messages on fossil fuels — from the same administration that has stalled the Keystone XL pipeline and pushed to wipe out the oil industry’s tax breaks, yet is also moving to open up much of the East Coast and the Arctic to offshore drilling.

“This study’s main finding flies in the face of fracking’s dangerous reality,” Rachel Richardson, director of Environment America’s Stop Drilling program, said in a statement. “The fact is, dirty drilling has caused documented, widespread water contamination across the country.”

Thursday’s congressionally mandated EPA report, a compilation of past studies, found isolated incidents in which water pollution was attributable to the use of fracking. But it failed to back up the idea that fracking poses a major threat to water supplies, contradicting years of activists’ warnings dramatized by images of burning tap water in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland.”

Those images have helped fuel a brush fire of grassroots resistance against fracking, a technology that has fostered energy booms in states like Pennsylvania and North Dakota while prompting authorities to ban the practice in places like New York state, Pittsburgh and even Denton, Texas.

Obama’s simultaneous embrace of both natural gas and an ambitious green-energy agenda has been one of the great paradoxes of his presidency — he has even lumped the two together under the heading of “wind, solar and natural gas.”

Marty Durbin, chief of the industry group America’s Natural Gas Alliance, described the EPA report as a sign of “real evolution in the president” when it comes to the economic and environmental benefits of gas. Still, Durbin was not prepared to declare Obama had become a complete booster of gas: “I’d hesitate to say that he’s either fully in our corner or working against us at every step.”

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has largely followed the same policy as Obama, calling for curbs on methane pollution from gas drilling sites while saying the fuel plays “an important bridge role in the transition to a cleaner energy economy.”

Some prominent Democrats remain split, though — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rejected fracking, for example, while California Gov. Jerry Brown supports it. The debate over fracking has been especially loud in the political swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, where fracking has created jobs and brought billions of dollars in new investments but also burdened communities with drilling rigs and heavy traffic.

Republicans are largely united in supporting fracking. And they made it clear they’ll use Thursday’s report as ammunition to oppose even the modest fracking regulations that the Obama administration has proposed, such as restrictions on the practice on public lands.

“The administration should now reconsider the burdensome regulations it intends to place on hydraulic fracturing on federal lands, and should certainly refrain from any notion of broader federal involvement in an issue that states and communities are safely managing,” House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a statement.

“States have been effectively regulating hydraulic fracturing for more than 40 years and this study is evidence of that,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said in a statement.

A worker uses hand signals to communicate with a co-worker over the sound of massive pumps at an Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc. hydraulic fracturing and extraction site in Colorado. | AP Photo

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the EPA report should help “keep the federal government out of the lane of states” in overseeing fracking. Congress prohibited the EPA from regulating most forms of fracking in a 2005 update to the Safe Drinking Water Act — a change that greens have labeled the “Halliburton loophole” due to the presumed influence of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Earlier this year, 10 Senate Democrats joined every Republican in voting against a measure that would have rolled back that loophole. The EPA’s latest findings on drinking water promise to deepen that divide within Obama’s party over how closely the federal government should monitor fracking at a time when environmentalists hope to corral new support for reining in a shale drilling boom they warn would put the nation on an unsustainable path of continued greenhouse gas emissions.

But green groups found reasons to welcome the EPA’s study, even as they lamented the narrow data sets it used and criticized the energy industry for fighting against a more complete analysis. For example, environmentalists hailed EPA for belying oil and gas producers’ frequent claim that no documented case exists of groundwater contamination linked to the fracking process.

In the wake of Thursday’s report, the industry is no longer “saying there’s no problem,” Natural Resources Defense Council senior policy analyst Amy Mall said in an interview. “Their message has shifted in a way that has to acknowledge there have been some problems found here.”

Thomas Burke, EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for research and development, denied charges by multiple green groups that drillers had deliberately stymied the study by withholding key data. The agency had “a generally very cooperative relationship with industry” over the course of its research,” Burke told reporters.

Burke also noted that the study, which remains in draft form while it awaits review by outside EPA advisers and a public comment period, was not intended to judge the effectiveness of existing fracking regulations or the value of new limits, “nor was it intended to be a numerical catalogue of all episodes of contamination.”

The study did, however, put Obama’s EPA in a spot it rarely occupies: basic alignment with a fossil-fuel industry that has long fought fiercely against federal regulations.

Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America’s Energy in Depth project, contrasted the EPA report with the public health-focused report that the Cuomo administration released to support the New York state fracking ban.

While that New York report was “complete invention,” Tucker said by email, “what we have here is a product from EPA that, while not perfect, acknowledges officially what most of us have known forever, which is that there’s nothing inherently unsafe about this technology. Far from it.”