Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson said Tuesday her agency is working on air quality regulations for areas impacted by natural gas production and hydraulic fracturing.

In an interview with National Public Radio’s Michele Norris at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Jackson said her agency is acting to control air quality in areas that are facing new impacts.

“You are going to have huge smog problems where you never had them before,” she said. “These are rural areas. ... There is a lot of activity around those wells and that has an impact on air quality — and we know it already. The EPA will soon be coming out with regulations to deal with the air quality around natural gas production.”

The regulations are expected to come at the conclusion of an ongoing two-year study.

“Fracking,” as the process is commonly known, has been used extensively in Western Colorado and Garfield County to drill wells accessing natural gas deposits. Fracking entails injecting high-pressured chemical cocktails into the ground to break up rocks so the gas can be extracted. Its environmental impacts, or lack thereof, have been hotly debated both locally and nationally.

Jackson said in a congressional hearing on fracking last month that there are no known cases of the practice polluting water, despite worries from the environmental community and areas adjacent to natural gas fields.

She added Tuesday that keeping groundwater safe from fracking pollution means keeping natural gas companies in line, and monitoring how they protect drinking water while drilling.

“If you get a bad operator in there,” she said, “someone who is not responsible, who is not seeing how important it is to get this right, they can contaminate an aquifer.”

Meanwhile, she praised the promise of cleaner energy from natural gas production and the economic boom it has provided to areas like Garfield County.

“Natural gas is an economic engine in communities that, literally a few years ago, didn’t have one ... All of a sudden they are literally boom towns,” she said. “I think natural gas production is an incredible opportunity for this country to transition to a cleaner fuel.”

Whether the burgeoning industry fulfills its promise, she argued, will depend largely on convincing people fracking is safe and that natural gas is profitable.

“Natural gas production will thrive in this country,” she said, “unless the American people and investors come to believe it’s not going to be financially viable or it’s going to hurt their health ... The way you avoid that is by stepping up to regulation rather than running from it.”

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