Portal:Water/The Halliburton Loophole

In 2005, the U.S. Congress exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act, in what is known as the "Halliburton Loophole." In 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney's "energy task force" touted the benefits of hydrofracking, while redacting references to human health hazards associated with the practice. Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton, which reportedly earns $1.5 billion a year from its energy operations, which relies substantially on its hydrofracking business.

The year before, the EPA undertook a study on the issue and "the EPA, despite its scientific judgment that there was a potential risk to groundwater supplies, which their report clearly says, then went ahead and very surprisingly concluded that there was no risk to groundwater," Lustgarten said on Democracy Now! in September 2009. "[P]art of my reporting found that throughout that process the EPA was closer than seemed comfortable with the industry. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests for some documents and found conversations between Halliburton employees and the EPA researchers, essentially asking for an agreement from Halliburton in exchange for more lax enforcement. The EPA, in these documents, appeared to offer that and agree to that. And it doesn’t appear, by any means, to have been either a thorough or a very objective study."