The presidential contest is shining a renewed spotlight on fracking — which has driven much of the current U.S. oil and gas boom even as it angers environmentalists.
Vice President Kamala Harris is no longer vowing to ban fracking as she did in 2019, but former President Donald Trump insists she would do just that. Tension around the issue is focused on Pennsylvania, the country’s No. 2 gas producer and the potential key to winning the electoral college.
Harris and Trump — the Democratic and Republican nominees for president — are set to square off in a debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia, where fracking is likely to grab some attention. But do voters have a handle on the technology and how its future could affect the energy sector?
“The issue of a ban is really more of a symbolic statement,” said Kevin Book, a managing director at consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners. “What we’re really asking is, ‘What is the Harris position on oil and gas?’”
Here are six questions about fracking, oil and gas and this year’s presidential election.
What is fracking?
In the United States, the term “fracking” has come to be a catch-all term for oil and gas drilling, at least onshore.
Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, which is one of many processes involved in developing an oil and gas well. After the well has been drilled, water, chemicals and sand are blasted down the hole under extremely high pressure to crack open the rock formation and release oil and gas.
The sand props the cracks open. Among other things, the chemicals serve to reduce the friction between the water and the well pipe.
Fracking is not a new thing. The process was developed in the late 1940s and was primarily used to get more oil and gas out of existing wells.
But about 20 years ago, oil and gas companies found new fracking techniques that could extract gas from formations that could not otherwise be tapped. The newer methods use far more water and pressure. Combined with new technologies to drill wells sideways underground and guide them precisely as they go, it spread oil and gas development into areas that hadn’t seen drilling in generations.
One of those places is Pennsylvania, which is part of what is now sometimes called the Shale Crescent, with Ohio and West Virginia. Fracking also revived production in places such as North Dakota, eastern Montana and Colorado. But the new technologies also revived drilling in widely recognized oil states such as Texas and Oklahoma.
But fracking, as a term, has come to be associated more broadly with the spread of drilling to new places that started in the years before 2010. That drilling boom has made the United States the leading producer of oil and gas in the world.
Generally, fracking excludes conventional wells, where the hole is drilled straight down without turning. Offshore wells are mostly conventional, vertical wells. Onshore, conventional wells usually don’t produce as much. And they are still often fracked in order to stimulate greater production.
How much fuel does fracking produce?
Almost all new wells in the United States are fracked at some point, especially onshore. According to S&P Global Commodity Insights, a firm that provides energy information to industry professionals, fracked wells account for 97 percent of all U.S. onshore production of oil and gas — measured in barrels of oil equivalent to account for both oil and gas.
When offshore is included, fracked wells account for about 93 percent of all U.S. production.
Last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, the United States produced a total of 39.25 quadrillion British thermal units of gas and averaged 12.9 million barrels of oil a day. A barrel is 42 gallons, so U.S. oil production equaled more than 540 million gallons.
How does it affect the environment?
Fracking is often presented as dangerous to groundwater. But the hydraulic fracturing process itself — the pressurized injection of chemical-laced fluid deep underground — has not been commonly found to contaminate groundwater.
The spread of oil and gas production to new areas, however, has brought with it all of the environmental downsides of oil and gas production to those who live and work near it. That includes truck traffic, noise, emissions of volatile organic compounds and greenhouse gases and sometimes leaks that contaminate groundwater and surface water.
On newer, fracked wells those problems can be larger and worse than with conventional wells that are smaller. Because wells can now be drilled horizontally, many are often grouped together on one well pad, concentrating traffic and pollution in one place.
And environmental groups say the newfound bounty of oil and gas has prevented a badly needed shift away from fossil fuels.
But the oil and gas industry says fracking has helped the environment by providing an abundance of natural gas to replace coal for electricity generation.
The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest lobbying group, says switching from coal to gas-fired generation accounts for 60 percent of power sector emissions reductions in the last 20 years. Gas does burn more cleanly than coal. But its increased use can lead to more leaks of methane — a particularly potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere.
As for oil, producers often stress that the United States has stricter environmental regulations than other oil-producing countries.
“Fracking is the reason the US leads the world in emissions reductions by unlocking vast amounts of clean, affordable natural gas that has displaced higher-emitting energy sources,” said Anne Bradbury, chief executive of the American Exploration & Production Council, which represents some of the top U.S. independent producers of oil and natural gas, in a statement to E&E News.
Hydraulic fracturing has also been found to cause earthquakes in places such as Oklahoma and Texas. But the most powerful and damaging earthquakes linked to oil and gas activity there were from underground disposal of wastewater from drilling. The massive increase in wastewater in need of disposal is a by-product of the fracking-driven oil boom.
Could a president ban fracking?
In a word: no. By himself or herself, a president cannot ban fracking. It would take an act of Congress, and the idea has never gained traction on Capitol Hill under Republican or Democratic control.
The federal government doesn’t have direct jurisdiction over most oil and gas production, as the majority occurs on private land. Fracking, and oil and gas production in general, is regulated at the state level, by state legislatures and state agencies.
Still, the question of banning fracking has come up in every presidential election at least as far back as 2016, when progressive Democrats wanted to put a ban in the Democratic Party platform.
Several states have banned fracking, most notably New York. Others banned it even though they don’t have much production, if any. New York’s ban, enacted in 2014, still allows low-volume fracking, which would generally be used on conventional wells.
In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, New York’s roughly 14,500 wells produced more than 228,000 barrels of oil and nearly 10 billion cubic feet of gas.
The last time federal officials legislated on fracking was in 2005, in then-President George W. Bush’s signature energy bill. A short provision in that bill became known as the “Halliburton Loophole,” named for the oilfield services company where former Vice President Dick Cheney had previously served as chief executive.
A federal appeals court had ruled that fracking should be regulated the same way as disposal wells under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The 2005 provision from Congress put that idea to rest by exempting it from a portion of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The effect of the “loophole” has often been exaggerated to mean that drilling is completely exempted from federal regulation, but it is not.
How could a president affect fracking?
Presidents and the executive agencies they control can still have a big say over energy policy generally, and thus fracking.
There’s approving exports, permitting interstate natural gas pipelines and regulation of methane emissions from pipelines and wells.
More broadly, aspects of oil and gas are covered by general environmental statutes limiting air and water pollution. And a Harris administration — through EPA and other agencies — would have a lot of say there.
“She said she would not ban hydraulic fracturing,” Book said. “That does not mean she would not clamp down on oil and gas.”
The Biden administration, for example, regulated methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, rejoined the Paris Agreement and imposed new regulations on thousands of miles of pipelines. Biden officials also announced an official pause on new permits for liquefied natural gas export terminals, but that was overturned in July by a Louisiana federal judge appointed by Trump.
Harris will likely continue and defend those policies, Book said, and perhaps expand on them.
“To the extent there’s regulation in place today that makes it harder to drill on public lands,” he said, the Harris administration “would defend that regulation and probably also extend it.”
But Harris could be cautious with energy policies, to avoid angering voters key to her reelection in four years, Book said. And she’s treading carefully on the drilling issue in the campaign now.
“The Harris campaign,” he Book said, “is trying to avoid being pulled between environmentalists and the Pennsylvania oil and gas sector.”
The president has more control over oil and gas development on public lands, which are responsible for roughly one-quarter of U.S. production. Most is handled by the Interior Department, which oversees lease sales, permitting and environmental regulations for that federal oil and gas program, giving the president some degree of authority over how fossil fuels are produced.
If she wins, environmental groups and climate activists will pressure Harris to restrict or end drilling on federal land because of its contribution to climate change. But Biden came into office saying he would end permitting of oil and gas on federal lands. When administration officials tried to pause new leasing in 2021, they were blocked by a federal judge appointed by Trump.
Green groups, though, are not pushing the White House or Congress to enact a fracking ban. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, has not advocated for a fracking ban. It does support a moratorium on fracking on federal land.
Broadly, environmentalists want a new president to deal with the threat of climate change. Andrew Wetzler, senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund, the group’s political arm, says that means policies that promote clean energy and restrict consumption of oil and gas.
“Certainly, we shouldn’t be expanding oil and gas drilling, and we shouldn’t be exporting vast quantities of liquefied natural gas,” Wetzler said. And he said the industry should be required to pay more of the costs of its pollution.
But the lack of any serious push for a fracking ban, Wetzler said, shows the idea that Harris wants a fracking ban “is a diversionary tactic meant to stoke fear.”
Will the issue matter in the presidential race?
Possibly. That’s because of fracking’s importance to the economy of Pennsylvania, which could decide the whole election with its 19 electoral votes.
Fracking also enjoys the support of a key political constituency in Pennsylvania: unions. Labor is traditionally Democratic, but Trump’s blue-collar appeal has tested the loyalty of many union members. And union leaders see gas production — fracking — as creating other types of jobs, such as pipefitters and pipeline engineers.
But that doesn’t mean most Pennsylvanians are ardently pro-fracking, or even think about oil and gas drilling all that much, said Christopher Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College. Instead, support for fracking is very important to a relatively small group of people — gas workers and certain trade union members.
“It’s important because it can affect a small group in a state that’s won by small margins,” said Borick, who has polled on energy issues for years. “For the vast majority of people in the state, they never think about fracking.”
Beyond that, Borick said, the Trump campaign is using the fracking issue to make other points. Trump says pro-environment, anti-drilling policies raise energy prices. And fracking is an example of an instance where Harris flip-flopped on an issue.
“Any time you reverse, you have to explain that,” Borick said.
But Trump doesn’t accept that Harris has changed her mind. The former president and his campaign team insist that she really would try to ban fracking.
“Our evidence is Kamala Harris’ own words,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an emailed response to questions. “She said she would support a fracking ban.”
The Harris campaign is seeking to flip the script back on Trump, accusing him of cozying up to oil industry titans who some congressional Democrats have said are gouging American consumers. And Harris points to the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, on which she cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
“Vice President Harris is focused on a future where all Americans have clean air, clean water, and affordable, reliable energy,” the Harris campaign said in an emailed statement, “while Trump’s lies are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class.”
