This report summarizes the fracking jobs published this week at FracFocus, the industry-funded chemical disclosure instrument. It includes the Who, What and Where of recent fracking activity: the operating companies, the chemicals they use (including quantities), and where these jobs are located.
This report is produced by Open-FF, an open source, public service project to make the FracFocus data more usable. The nature of the fracking chemical data is complicated and can be difficult to make sense of; Open-FF aims to make it those data more digestible. In addition, FracFocus disclosures are plagued by inconsistencies, ambiguous and missing values and many obvious data errors; Open-FF flags and filters many of those problems. Our hope is that these reports give readers both big-picture perspectives of industry activities as well as enough detail to dig deeply into specifics such as individual chemicals, fracking job, or company.
In this report:¶
Overview of all FracFocus disclosures published this week¶
- by State, County, Operators and Federal/Indian indicators
- Water use
- Recognized Chemicals of Concern
- Proprietary claims including
- by state
- mass of reported categories of materials
Detailed list of all disclosures including:¶
- Location, company name, API number, water use, and Federal/Indian well indicator
- Link to satellite image and Google map of fracking site
- Flags indicating problems or areas of concern:
- High levels of proprietary claims
- Water use: missing data or very large volumes
- Chemical percentage: disclosure total is out of tolerance
- Long delay before publication
- Chemicals of concern
Disclosures with masses of Chemicals of Concern in the top 10% of FracFocus¶
Notes:¶
Raw, unfiltered data: This weekly report summarizes the disclosures that were published in FracFocus over the past week. This report reflects raw names and numbers that have not yet been checked for validity. To see cleaned data set for earlier dates, go to the Open-FF data catalog or at CodeOcean.
... by county¶
... by top Operators¶
Operator list for all disclosures¶
... "Federal wells" or "Indian wells"¶
Total number of proprietary claims this week¶
Thick vertical lines in the graph indicate 25, 50 and 75% percentiles for this week's disclosures.
Recognized Chemicals of Concern used in these disclosures¶
The following table is based on lists of chemicals that have health or environmental effects: SDWA, CWA, Proposition 65, and TEDX.
| Explanation of columns in the index |
|---|
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| CID | is the chemical ID used in the disclosure table |
| bgCAS | is the CAS registration number of the chemical |
| record_count | indicates the number of records in this week's disclosures. A given chemical may appear more than once in a disclosure |
| proportional rank of biggest | how the largest max from this week compares to the rest of FracFocus data (through last update). Ex. 95.0 means that this mass was in the top 5% of all uses ever recorded in FracFocus. If there are records with values of 90% or more, a list of all disclosures are in a table later in this report. |
| Chemical Name | is one of the common names for the material |
| max mass | is the single greatest mass of the chemical in this week's disclosures (in pounds) |
| SDWA CWA | indicates if the chemical is on the Safe Drinking Water Act list or the Clean Water Act list (compiled by the Wylie Lab) |
| CA Prop 65 | indicates if the chemical is on California's Proposition 65 list |
| TEDX | indicates if the chemical is on The Endocrine Disruption Exchange list |
| PFAS or precursors | indicates that the chemical is on the EPA's list of PFAS-related chemicals |
| EPA's Volatile List | indicates that the chemical is on the EPA's list of volatile chemicals: "National Volatile Organic Compound Emissions" |
| FF history | link to summary of this chemical for all of FracFocus (filtered data - up to last major update) |
| ChemID link | link to the ChemID website for this chemical |
Proprietary labeling¶
FracFocus allows disclosures to hide the identity of chemicals that companies claim are business secrets. This practice has been controversial since the beginning of FracFocus and there have been purported measures taken to reduce the proprietary claims. Nevertheless, they are still commonly used. The following summarizes how much the past week's disclosures hid chemical identity with these claims. The individual disclosure listing later in this report specifies the percentage of chemical records that are hidden by these claims for every disclosure.
Open-FF detects proprietary claims solely by the terms used in the CASNumber field. Other fields may also indicate such claims but are ignored here, so these numbers are conservative.
Portion of records hidden this week, by state¶
Ingredient names used for proprietary records for this week's disclosures¶
Because these are proprietary claims, the reported ingredient name will not be specific, just a general class.
In some cases, companies do not report the PercentHFJob or report 0.0% for proprietary records. We use 0.0 pounds for those records in the following table.
Notes:¶
Listing of chemicals in individual disclosures: In the table below, individual fracking disclosures are identified by APINumber. If you are interested in seeing the details of the raw data, use that APINumber at the FracFocus "Find a Well" site. That search site will serve pdf files of individual fracking events to your computer with most of the same raw data available used here. However, mass of chemicals is not available from these pdfs.
Maps: In the table below, a link is provided to a Google map/satellite view of the location provided in the disclosure. Many recently published fracking sites are newer than the satellite image that Google uses, so the well pad may not be visible. However, you can still view the geographic context of the drilling site.
Listing of all new disclosures published this week¶
| Columns descriptions and issues to look for |
|---|
- FID - Fracking job ID number (used in following table to identify heavy use of chemical)
- Water volume - volume in gallons of the water base fluid used in a fracking job
- Especially large fracking carrier (>30 million gallons)
- No data or a report of ZERO gallons of water. This prevents the calculation of chemical mass
- TVD - True vertical depth (feet)
- No data or a report of ZERO feet.
- Deeper than deepest oil well (35,050 ft.): likely error
- Percent proprietary - proportion of chemical records for which identity is hidden
- 25% or greater
- End date - Last day of job
- many states require disclosure within 30 or 90 days.
- sometimes end date is in the future, indicating mis-representation
- Total percentage ("perc sum") - the sum of all records in a disclosure should be 100% (within a tolerance)
- if less than 90%, disclosure is probably incomplete
- greater than 110% - often caused by a "system approach" entry error: duplicates of some chemical records or hidden percentages in the tradename/purpose/supplier section.
- CIDs in disclosure - see the Chemicals of Concern table above for more information