Can a president ban fracking? Experts fact-check Harris and Trump’s oil and gas claims

(NEW YORK) — When Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met on the ABC News debate stage this week, the vice president reiterated her changed energy position, saying she would not institute a “fracking ban” if elected.

The debate was held at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is a key swing state in the race with the second-highest oil and gas economy in the country.

“Let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania,” Harris said Tuesday evening.

Harris vowed she would not enact a national ban on fracking despite having voiced support for anti-drilling measures at a climate crisis town hall in 2019, during her first campaign for the White House.

When she joined President Joe Biden’s ticket, however, she moved away from that stance and helped pass the administration’s landmark 2022 infrastructure bill — which invests in both domestic oil production and green energy solutions.

“I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” Harris said Tuesday.

Energy experts told ABC News after the debate that Harris and Trump’s conversation surrounding fracking was misleading on both sides of the aisle, saying the president has less control over fracking than may be publicly perceived.

“I heard some confusion on both sides, really, in the debate last night, when we talk about fracking,” Tim Tarpley, president of the Energy Workforce and Technology Council, told ABC News.

“Both candidates were throwing around this so-called fracking ban to each other, but there wasn’t a lot of clarity about what they were actually talking about and how that would actually work in practice,” Tarpley added.

The Harris and Trump campaigns did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.

What is fracking?

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, is an extraction technique used to recover oil and gas from shale rock, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Producers drill into the earth and direct a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals at shale rock layers to release the gas inside.

Fracking accounts for the bulk of America’s domestic oil and gas production with 95% of new wells being hydraulically fractured, creating two-thirds of the total U.S. gas market and about half of U.S. crude oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

Can it be banned?

On the debate stage, Trump went after Harris’ energy position, saying, “She will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania. If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on Day 1.”

The notion that a president could ban all fracking in America is misleading, with Congress ultimately having the final say on such actions.

Additionally, fracking wells in the U.S. are predominantly on private land, with federal land leases only accounting for 24% of the total number of wells. The president’s jurisdiction over banning fracking would only account for federal land, according to Tarpley and the American Petroleum Institute.

“When we get into this back-and-forth on the leases, it’s very important to know it is only 24% of total production, most of productions on private land. So I think, I think those facts are important to point out, as we have that discussion,” Tarpley said.

While Trump did not lay out his energy plan during the debate Tuesday, the former president has been vocal about approving increased fracking leases on federal land and reviving plans for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, which Biden canceled after taking office.

Why is this important in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation that covers about two-thirds of the state. The massive oil-producing shale also extends into parts of New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia.

As of April 2024, the Marcellus Shale contained about 120 million barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

David Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC), told ABC News “The natural gas industry is very important to Pennsylvania.”

Housing 11,000 fracking wells in the state, Pennsylvania accounted for 18% of the total U.S. natural gas production and 32% of U.S. shale gas production, according to Callahan and MSC data shared with ABC News from 2022.

That same year, the industry contributed more than $41 billion in economic activity, which said boosted the state’s gross domestic product (GDP) by nearly $25 billion, according to according to MSC.

The oil and gas industry also equates for a large portion of the state’s workforce. In 2022, the industry supported 123,000 jobs, with an average wage of $97,000, according to MSC.

Will fracking ever make the U.S. energy independent?

United States continues to produce and export the most crude oil out of any country, at any time, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, crude oil production averaged 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, breaking the previous U.S. and global record of 12.3 million, set in 2019 under Trump’s leadership, according to the agency.

Harris touted this boom during the debate while promoting more investments in diverse sources of energy to “reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

“We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil,” Harris said.

Experts say, however, energy independence is not as cut and dry as one might think, with the global oil market being deeply embedded into production needs and refining capabilities.

“Even in a scenario where we were producing enough oil and gas here in the United States to be completely self-sufficient, we wouldn’t necessarily have the refining capacity,” Tarpley said.

Many American refineries were largely built before the nation’s fracking boom over the last 20 years, according to Tarpley, which means the infrastructure is designed to process heavier crude oil, predominately from Russia and the Middle East.

Energy independence won’t be found at the bottom of an American fracking well, he says, because “those refining assets cannot easily be retooled to take U.S. crude.”

Alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power are not limited to the same global constraints but are not yet at the infrastructure capacity to meet energy needs.

In 2023, the United States generated about 4,178 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity from utility-scale generators, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association.

Of that, approximately 19% came from nuclear energy, 21% from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, and 60% from oil and gas.