[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6464]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          HYDRAULIC FRACTURING

  (Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I have the privilege of 
serving as co-chairman of the Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, a 
bipartisan group working to identify challenges and further utilizing 
this clean, abundant energy resource.
  One of these challenges has to do with the swarm of misinformation 
that surrounds the process of hydraulic fracturing, the extraction 
process which is stringently regulated at the State level.
  On April 29, after a 16-month investigation, regulators in my home 
State of Pennsylvania found that hydraulic fracturing, contrary to 
highly publicized claims, is not to blame for high methane levels found 
in drinking water in the town of Franklin Forks. Instead, it was due to 
naturally occurring methane. The same incident was used by 
environmentalists as an example of the dangers of fracking and the 
subject of numerous media reports.
  Mr. Speaker, science and facts--not rhetoric and scare tactics--must 
guide our energy policy. The fact of the matter is that there has been 
no confirmed reports of groundwater contamination from hydraulic 
fracturing. Even former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has testified to 
this fact.

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