Hydraulic frac­tur­ing, or frack­ing, could soon be banned in Wash­ing­ton State if a bill approved by the Sen­ate today becomes law. Sen­ate Bill 5145, spon­sored by Sen­a­tor Jesse Salomon, would ban the destruc­tive prac­tice of inject­ing flu­ids into gas and oil wells under pres­sures great enough to frac­ture oil and gas-bear­ing rock.

Twen­ty-nine sen­a­tors vot­ed for the bill on final pas­sage, with eigh­teen opposed.

The roll call was as follows:

Roll Call
SB 5145
Hydraulic fracturing
3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
2/13/2019

Yeas: 29; Nays: 18; Excused: 2

Vot­ing Yea: Sen­a­tors Bil­lig, Car­lyle, Cleve­land, Con­way, Darneille, Das, Dhin­gra, Frockt, Hasegawa, Hawkins, Hobbs, Hunt, Keis­er, Kud­er­er, Liias, Lovelett, McCoy, Mul­let, Nguyen, Palum­bo, Ped­er­sen, Ran­dall, Rolfes, Sal­daña, Salomon, Takko, Van De Wege, Well­man, Wil­son (Claire)

Vot­ing Nay: Sen­a­tors Bai­ley, Beck­er, Braun, Brown, For­tu­na­to, Holy, Hon­ey­ford, King, O’Ban, Pad­den, Rivers, Schoesler, Short, Wag­oner, Walsh, War­nick, Wil­son (Lyn­da), Zeiger

Excused: Sen­a­tors Erick­sen, Sheldon

The Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus was uni­fied in its sup­port of the bill. One Repub­li­can, Brad Hawkins, joined them to vote aye. Of the remain­ing Repub­li­cans, eigh­teen vot­ed no, while two (Doug Erick­sen and Tim Shel­don) were excused.

Although there is no oil or gas pro­duc­tion cur­rent­ly hap­pen­ing in Wash­ing­ton, that does­n’t mean there won’t be any in the future. That’s why Sen­ate Bill 5145 is so impor­tant. It safe­guards our lithos­phere and water sup­ply by out­law­ing fracking.

As the bil­l’s pre­am­ble explains:

The leg­is­la­ture finds that hydraulic frac­tur­ing of under­ground for­ma­tions for the removal of oil and gas deposits is a rel­a­tive­ly new tech­nol­o­gy whose long-term impacts upon human health and envi­ron­men­tal qual­i­ty are large­ly unknown. This tech­nol­o­gy requires large quan­ti­ties of frack­ing flu­ids con­tain­ing chem­i­cals that are exempt from pub­lic dis­clo­sure and which may con­t­a­m­i­nate ground­wa­ter and sur­face waters used as drink­ing water supplies.

Each well in which hydraulic frac­tur­ing is employed requires more than one mil­lion gal­lons of water per year, with the aver­age well using from three to eight mil­lion gal­lons of water over its life­time. In many areas of the state, the exist­ing ground­wa­ter sup­plies and sur­face water sources are ful­ly appro­pri­at­ed, and such large new demands would threat­en exist­ing uses for agri­cul­ture, indus­tri­al, and munic­i­pal purposes.

The leg­is­la­ture fur­ther finds that as much as nine­ty per­cent of the frack­ing flu­ids must be dis­posed of fol­low­ing use in the frack­ing well, with most of this flu­id sub­se­quent­ly returned fol­low­ing lim­it­ed treat­ment back into under­ground injec­tion wells.

Very lit­tle is known at this time regard­ing the impact that these dis­posed flu­ids may have upon ground­wa­ter aquifers and the poten­tial adverse human health impacts from such exposure.

Oth­er adverse envi­ron­men­tal impacts have also been iden­ti­fied in hydraulic frac­tur­ing. Large quan­ti­ties of methane are released in this process, which is both a tox­ic pol­lu­tant as well as a very potent green­house gas. Hydraulic frac­tur­ing is also sus­pect­ed to be the source of increased seis­mic­i­ty in some regions with numer­ous wells.

Our team at the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute strong­ly sup­ports this leg­is­la­tion and thanks all who vot­ed for its pas­sage. We urge the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to take up this bill and send it to Gov­er­nor Inslee for his signature.