“The chemical-disclosure issue has become a proxy for public apprehension with all aspects of hydraulic fracturing…”
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports,
In a belated attempt to soothe public suspicion about shale-gas drilling, state regulators increasingly are forcing natural gas producers to disclose the chemicals used to hydraulically fracture natural gas wells.
Starting Feb. 1, Texas becomes the latest state to require drilling companies to disclose the volumes of chemicals and water they use in “fracking,” which involves the high-pressure injection of chemically treated water and sand deep underground to release entrapped oil and gas.
Texas is the fifth state to require the disclosure of well-by-well data with an online public clearinghouse, FracFocus.org. Colorado, Montana, Louisiana, and North Dakota also require posting of data with FracFocus…
Seems extremely obvious to focus on this problem. All those, just trust the industries people, are going to have to realize that the mistakes made with this technologies are permanant and very destructive to our shared environments. At least with wind farms, etc. things can be reversed. The companies don’t want to let us know just how bad this stuff is…
Pretty simple…if you want to know what chemicals are being used in a frac job just go to the well site and ask for the MSDS. OSHA requires one for every “hazardous” chemical located at the work site.
Confidential Business Information has always been available to the EPA and the States. If the EPA requests it, they get it and can evaluate the hazards and make a determination. The information is still kept confidential but the hazards are addressed. The disclosure that this is talking about is for that information to be available to the general public. This never seems to be in the articles and from what the EPA says you’d think they didn’t know that either.
No doubt, the ingredients used in fracking constitute proprietary corporate information. Naturally, they will fight this. Then they will be forced into disclosure by the EPA, at which point they will cannibalize each other’s proprietary information. The EPA will then set standards for what recipe may be used for fracking. At which point we will discover that different recipes work under different conditions, and either some wells will be abandoned, or there will be fights with the EPA, or both. We need to colonize Mars, as a top priority, to get away from all this crap.