Fracking is a major issue in the presidential race and critical for Pennsylvania

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," as it is known, has been a hot-button issue in the 2024 race for the White House between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, as the two candidates battle for votes in energy-producing states like Pennsylvania.

The issue was brought up during the sole presidential debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees, which was held in the key battleground state — where support for fracking is high, and 19 electoral votes are up for grabs.

While running for president in 2019, Harris — at the time a senator — said that "there's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking." She has since shifted her stance on the issue after becoming the 2024 Democratic nominee, saying now that she does not support a ban on fracking. She was questioned about that policy change by the debate moderators in September.

"Fracking? She's been against it for 12 years," Trump said of Harris on the debate stage.

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"This is a radical left liberal that would do this," the former president added. "She will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania. If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one."

Harris has faced continued pressure to clarify her stance on energy production since becoming her party's nominee, and that pressure intensified this month. Last week, her campaign's top climate adviser said that the vice president would not "promote" new fossil fuel drilling, comments that raised eyebrows and were later walked back as Harris has tried to alleviate fears over her previous positions on fracking.

So how critical is fracking to the U.S. and Pennsylvania?

According to a Department of Energy report from 2021, 75% of the domestic natural gas and 63% of the domestic crude oil produced in the U.S. in 2019 relied on the combination of horizontal drilling and fracking technologies.

A study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers last year found that the oil and natural gas industry supported 10.8 million total jobs in the U.S. in 2021, which was 5.4% of total U.S. employment.

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Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the country. The API study found oil and natural gas combined provided a total of 423,700 jobs in the state in 2021, or 5.6% of Pennsylvania’s total employment.

"If Pennsylvania were a country, it would be the fifth- or sixth-largest gas producer in the world," Dustin Meyer, API's senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, told FOX Business. He said fracking has been "transformative to the state of Pennsylvania… It's really difficult to overstate."

The fracking process, which involves injecting water, chemicals and sand into shale rock at high pressure to extract natural gas, has revolutionized the oil and gas industry by allowing producers to reach large quantities within shale rock that were previously unattainable and cost-prohibitive to drill.

As a result, oil and gas production in the U.S. has nearly tripled over the past decade.

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Proponents argue that fracking is critical for the U.S. becoming energy independent and is also the reason for a sharp drop in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade.

Opponents, however, say that fracking pollutes drinking water and air and releases greenhouse gases into the ozone, contributing to global warming.

But recent polling suggests an overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of boosting the country's oil and natural gas production, and the concentration of proponents is even higher in swing states.

A New York Times/Sienna poll conducted in September showed nearly two-thirds of voters nationwide support increasing domestic production of oil and natural gas, and a Morning Consult survey of voters in seven battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — found that more than 80% of voters in each state support increasing American oil and natural gas production.

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Meyer says he believes the reason fracking has become such an important part of the election conversation is because it is really a proxy for the broader energy renaissance that the U.S. has experienced over the last 15 years.

"So when candidates from both parties say that they support fracking, yes, they're saying that they support that technology, but they're also saying that they support all of the benefits that go along with it," he said. "The job creation, the lower costs, the decrease in imports, all of those benefits are the result of U.S. energy development — so much of which has come from hydraulic fracturing."

Fox News' Aubrie Spady and Michael Lee contributed to this report.