A coalition of nine environmental and open government groups filed a lawsuit on January 7 in an effort to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to collect information on chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking.

Fracking involves the injection of water, chemicals, and sand below ground to extract oil and gas from shale formations. Opponents say that the process is environmentally dangerous, especially to drinking water supplies, while the energy industry maintains that fracking and water contamination have never been definitively linked. Meanwhile, the increased use of fracking has driven U.S. natural gas production to new heights.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal court in Washington, D.C., says that the chemicals used in fracking and other oil and gas operations should be disclosed under the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) program, which Congress established in 1986 in the wake of the disastrous 1984 gas leak at the union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. TRI is a publicly available database of information on toxic chemical releases and other waste management activities reported annually by certain covered industry groups, as well as Federal facilities. Such disclosure currently is not mandatory for oil and gas extraction, and the lawsuit follows a petition that the groups filed in October 2012, requesting that EPA require compliance by that industry.

“Because Federal and State disclosure requirements are full of gaps and exemptions and otherwise have not kept pace with industry expansion, public information about the oil and gas extraction industry’s use and release of these toxic chemicals remains scant,” Adam Kron, a lawyer for the Environmental Integrity Project, wrote in the complaint.

The new litigation comes at a time when the Bureau of Land Management is developing rules to require companies to publicly disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations on public and Indian lands.

For more background on this topic, see the March 2012 Congressional Digest on “Fracking and Drinking Water Safety.”