EPA site replaces 'fracking' with 'unconventional oil and gas'

Screenshots by Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

The Environmental Protection Agency has largely replaced the terms "hydraulic fracturing" and "fracking" on its website, according to a report released last week by the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative. The replacement phrase, "unconventional oil and gas," is a common term in the industry but not in common parlance.

There are two ways to interpret the EPA’s change, Brian Kahn writes for the environmentalist publication Earther: "The benign take is that the term is inclusive of a variety of ways fossil fuels are extracted. Fracking is just one step in one process to get at hard-to-access oil and gas. Unconventional oil and gas include all sorts of things like tar sands, for example, though the new EPA pages don’t get into those or even defining what the term means. There’s another, less charitable read on the change, though. Anti-fracking sentiment has been on the rise for years, and majorities of Americans of all political stripes favor tighter regulation, according to Gallup polling done earlier this year. The Trump administration does not agree."

EPA made many other changes in the overhaul, Kahn reports. It removed the section that said the agency promoted transparency and conducted outreach to stakeholders; added a section highlighting partnerships with oil and natural-gas sectors and industry associations, and removed "a lot of details of oil and gas extraction on air quality (of which there are many)," he writes. "It also removed a sentence describing how 'prudent steps to reduce these impacts [from rapidly increasing gas extraction] are essential now even as further research to understanding potential risks continues.'"