MEMBER for Hammond Adrian Pederick said he wanted to get a balanced point of view and took pro-active steps to find out what the mining industry was doing.
"Without doing that it would have been farsical," he said.
Through Mr Pederick's contacts, the group met a woman outside Pittsburgh who was receiving regular payments for having a well pad on her property, and Jeff Heller from Steuben County, New York State, who is president of a coalition of 1700 farmers campaigning to lift the fracking moratorium in the area and benefit from the mineral royalties.
Mr Pederick, who acknowledges his background in the gas industry 30 years ago in northern SA, said the scaremongering about fracking was being used as a weapon by the renewable energy movement against fossil fuel production.
He said he fully supported the Parliamentary Inquiry into Unconventional Gas Projects and said any move into unconventional gas projects in the South East needed strict controls in place.
"We are a long way away from powering our trains or trucks on renewable fuels. Our society relies on oil and gas. Do we want to be totally reliant on overseas sources for all our energy needs?" he said.
