Safe Hydration is an American Right in Energy Development Act of 2017

Safe Hydration is an American Right in Energy Development Act of 2017

This bill amends the Safe Drinking Water Act to require states, in order to obtain primary enforcement responsibility for a state underground injection control program, to prohibit the underground injection of fluids or propping agents pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities unless the person proposing to conduct the hydraulic fracturing operations agrees to conduct testing and report data in accordance with this bill. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a process to extract underground resources such as oil or gas from a geologic formation by injecting water, a propping agent (e.g., sand), and chemical additives into a well under enough pressure to fracture the geological formation.

Regulations under the Act for state underground injection control programs must require any person conducting such hydraulic fracturing operations to: (1) conduct testing of underground sources of drinking water in accordance with sampling and testing requirements described in this bill, and (2) report to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the testing results.

Hydraulic fracturing operations are exempted from those testing and reporting requirements if there is no accessible underground source of drinking water within a radius of one mile of the site where the operations occur.

The EPA must establish and maintain a publicly accessible and searchable database of testing results.

Written by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. All summary versions on Congress.gov