Natural gas companies can keep drilling per usual, say the
Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules for hydraulic fracturing or,
as everybody who’s not a government employee refers to it, “fracking.” The changes the rules aim to affect won’t kick in overnight, however. In what some, like Fuel Fix’s Jennifer A Dlouhy, consider
another case of the government caving in to the wishes of the
well-funded energy lobby, the rules won’t take effect until 2015.
The new regulations are
designed to cut down on the polluting by-products of fracking, which
involves drilling through rock and injecting a water-based chemical
mixture to force out natural gas. However, after protest from the
lobbyists, the EPAÂ will allow the gas industry to hold on to the status
quo until 2015, as long as they burn off some of the carcinogenic gases
with a process called “flaring.”
