Fact Check: Why Trump’s new campaign ad on fracking is misleading

What questions do you have about the 2024 elections? What major issues do you want candidates to address? Let us know.

A new ad released Wednesday on social media by former President Donald Trump falsely claims Harris has plans to ban fracking in Pennsylvania. The ad, which runs for 30 seconds, is misleading in several ways. It begins with a voiceover that says, “Harris will ban all fracking.”

This is false.

No president has the authority to ban “all fracking.”

Only Congress can ban fracking, a process used to extract oil and natural gas. Fracking prompted a natural gas drilling boom in Pennsylvania and helped make it one of the largest natural gas producing states. But a president is limited to banning oil and gas production on federal land. Pennsylvania has very little federal land viable for fracking.

The Allegheny National Forest, in the north central part of the state, is the only place where federal leases exist, and they span about 850 acres.

The vast majority of leases in Pennsylvania are on private land, something a president cannot touch. The state also leases land to oil and gas development – in 2020, those leases included about 250,000 acres.

The ad then uses a clip from Harris’ failed presidential run in 2019 where a climate activist asks if “she will commit to a federal ban on fracking her first day in office.”  In the clip, Harris said she would ban fracking.

But Harris subsequently changed her position when she became President Joe Biden’s running-mate. She reiterated her shift on fracking in the recent debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia Tuesday night.

“I made that very clear in 2020,” Harris said Tuesday. “I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States.”

The voiceover of the ad then falsely claims a ban, which again, cannot be implemented by the executive branch, would “immediately put tens of thousands out of work.”

The number on screen cites 120,000 Pennsylvania jobs in the natural gas industry that would be lost under this fictitious ban and cites an industry study by the Marcellus Shale Coalition.

That number doesn’t refer to direct jobs in the industry, but rather, includes estimates for jobs that the authors claim that would not exist if not for oil and gas production.

The state of Pennsylvania reported about 26,000 direct jobs in the oil and gas industry in 2020, less than 1% of all jobs in the state. Four years later, that number is even smaller. Despite an increase in production post pandemic, jobs in the industry have not kept up, according to a recent report from E&E News, which cites the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in which direct oil and gas production jobs in Pennsylvania was about 12,000 in 2023.

An early study on job creation from Penn State University, published in 2010  and paid for by the industry, said that by 2020, industry jobs would top 200,000 – it’s unclear if the study intended those to be direct or indirect. But six years later, another study from Penn State, with different authors, reported about 26,000 direct industry  jobs, half of which were filled by out-of-state residents.

In 2019, a study published in Nature Sustainability found that fracking for Marcellus Shale gas created about 40,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The ad also claims any ban would “send utility bills skyrocketing.” Again, a president cannot ban fracking on private or state land. But several reports have questioned Trump’s plan to cut energy bills by expanding oil and gas production.

Finally, the ad refers to “clean energy fracking.” It’s unclear what that means exactly, but fossil fuels are not “clean” as both the production and usage contribute to overall air pollution along with climate warming greenhouse gas emissions.