Colorado oil and gas companies have pumped at least 30m lbs of secret chemicals into the ground over the past 18 months without making legally required disclosures, according to a new analysis.
That’s in spite of first-in-the-nation rules requiring operators and their suppliers to list all chemicals used in drilling and extraction, while also banning any use of PFAS “forever chemicals” at oil and gas sites. Since the transparency law took effect in July 2023, operators have fracked 1,114 sites across the state, but as of 1 May chemical disclosures have not been filed for 675 of them – more than 60% of the total, the analysis says.
Chevron, the world’s third-biggest fossil-fuel company by market cap, is by far the most serious offender, operating about 375, or more than half, of the non-compliant wells.
“We thought that the Colorado law was going to break through the culture of secrecy that surrounds the use of potentially toxic chemicals in oil and gas production,” said Dusty Horwitt, an attorney and researcher who was lead author on the analysis, which is based on public disclosures. “But the lack of compliance has left the secrecy in place, putting people’s health at risk.”
The report, released Tuesday by the environmental groups Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Physicians for Social Responsibility Colorado, FracTracker Alliance, and the Colorado Sierra Club, was shared exclusively with the Guardian.
In a statement to the Guardian, Chevron spokesperson Paula Beasley said that Chevron is already disclosing all of its fracking fluid ingredients that are not trade secrets, and argued that the responsibility to disclose trade secret chemicals ultimately lies with ingredient suppliers, not with the companies who use them.
In order to drill wells and extract minerals, fossil fuel operators pump huge volumes of pressurized liquid into the earth to fracture – or “frack” – bedrock, stimulating the release of trapped oil and gas. These fluids are mostly water and sand by volume, but they also contain industrial chemicals, including biocides, surfactants, and lubricants.
Numerous studies show that these fluids can contain toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, as well as carcinogens like PFAS – a broad class of chemicals that persist in the environment indefinitely – and benzene. This pollution can then end up in aquifers, public waterways, and residents’ drinking water, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
John Spear, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, compared fracking to emptying a syringe filled with mayonnaise into your thigh: it puts a whole bunch of material into a space that’s not equipped to handle it.
“We’re putting things down there that are probably not meant to be digested by the subsurface,” said Spear, who testified about the need for fracking chemical transparency during the 2022 legislative session. “That becomes a potential problem, because if it doesn’t know how to handle it, it’s just going to move it around.”
The problem is especially acute for people who live near an oil or gas well, a scenario with well-established links to leukemia, birth abnormalities, and other serious health outcomes. Secretive chemicals can make it difficult to provide adequate care for those individuals, said Elizabeth Gillespie, a hospitalist at Denver Health Medical Center and professor of medicine at University of Colorado Anschutz, who was recently elected to chair PSR Colorado’s board.
“Not seeing that full list of chemicals and understanding the full extent of that exposure really makes us unable to take a complete medical history,” she said.
Most major oil and gas producing states require operators to post information about their fracking chemicals to FracFocus, a nationwide disclosure database maintained by state-level environmental officials. But for years, fossil fuel companies have used trade secret claims to shield the full picture of their chemical use from scrutiny. In 2021, for instance, 88% of FracFocus disclosures used confidentiality to shield at least one proprietary ingredient from scrutiny – the so-called “Halliburton loophole”. Between 2014 and 2021, over 7bn lbs of these secret chemicals were pumped nationwide, according to a study in Environmental Pollution.
Under the law passed in 2022, Colorado operators and their suppliers must now disclose all downhole chemical ingredients to the Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC), the state oil and gas regulator, within 150 days. ECMC must then post the chemicals used on its website, though the exact proportion of ingredients in a given formulation can still remain secret. That year, in a separate bill, lawmakers banned any use of PFAS at oil and gas sites.
A 2022 report from Physicians for Social Responsibility found that PFAS had been used for fracking in close to 300 wells in Colorado, though trade secret designations made a more complete analysis impossible.
The new analysis shows that operators and their suppliers have broadly failed to comply with the new disclosure rules since they went into effect in July 2023. Between then and 1 May, 31 operators have fracked in Colorado, but ECMC has only posted information about trade secret chemicals for eleven of them. The other 20 operators and their suppliers have not complied at all, now nearly two years later.
In comments to the Guardian, Chevron’s Beasley said that “manufacturers and suppliers of [trade secret] chemicals are ultimately responsible for whether their formulations are disclosed – not operators.”
Implementation does depend upon manufacturers sharing the ingredients in their formulations with their oil and gas customers, or with ECMC. However the agency’s industry guidance makes clear it sees both operators and chemical manufacturers as disclosers, while asserting that “the statute now requires disclosure of all chemical products used in downhole operations, regardless of if a discloser believes that a chemical constituent is a trade secret or proprietary information”.
The Colorado code of regulations also requires chemical information to be provided to the commission “at least 30 days before the discloser begins selling, distributing, or using the chemical product”.
Meanwhile, the disclosures that do exist appear to be incomplete, said report co-author Gary Allison, a FracTracker consulting data scientist who helped launch Open-FF, a website that provides additional insight into FracFocus data. When Horwitt and Allison compared the chemicals marked “trade secret” in FracFocus with the list of chemicals on ECMC’s website, they found numerous discrepancies. Among the eleven companies whose wells nominally complied with the rules, all of them had claimed secret chemicals to FracFocus that were not subsequently disclosed by the regulator.
All this makes it impossible to say exactly what is being pumped underground. Environmentalists are concerned they don’t know if PFAS is still being used despite its ban on sites.
In comments to the Guardian, ECMC said it was still working with industry to ensure compliance, citing operational changes at the agency and the difficulty of rolling out new rule changes.
“We’ve implemented 17 mission-changing rule-makings in the past five years, which is an unprecedented degree of change in our agency’s 74-year history,” said ECMC spokesperson Kristin Kemp, in an emailed statement. “Nonetheless there’s more work to be done regarding the implementation and continuous assessment of the implementation. The paradigm shift in the state’s energy regulations can’t happen overnight.”
But Carol Hawkins, a resident-turned-activist in Weld County, the epicenter of Colorado’s fracking industry, says the commission isn’t moving fast enough to protect public health.
“We rush by these well pads on our way to work or to go up to the mountains or whatever it is we’re doing. And we don’t even realize the toxins pouring off those sites, because it’s invisible to the naked eye,” said Hawkins, who says her home in Ault is surrounded on three sides by nearby fracking sites. “It’s oil and gas in cahoots with our state government. We feel powerless.”
Blown well
An April incident underscores the importance of public transparency. On April 6, a well at Chevron subsidiary Noble’s Bishop pad experienced a blowout during the course of normal operations. Over the next four days, it emitted a massive amount of oil, condensate, and wellbore fluid into the environment.
According to information posted on Chevron’s website, 380 people coordinated on the response, including a contractor who was hospitalized as a result. The spill, which was roughly a mile from downtown Galeton, Colorado, caused an elementary school to be shut down for much of the month. Ultimately, Chevron recovered nearly 90,000 barrels of E & P waste – waste generated from drilling, fracking, and/or production – that had sprayed out from the site, according to ECMC’s webpage devoted to the incident.
At that well, according to the Guardian’s analysis of FracFocus data, Chevron had pumped roughly 15,000 gallons of a trade secret chemical into the ground.
While the eruption was ongoing, graduate students from Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences drove out to the area near Galeton to collect air pollution samples. On 8 April, two of them, Lena Low and Jared Stickney, roved out in the department’s research vehicle, a Chevy Tahoe outfitted with field sampling equipment.
“You could see, even from a couple miles away, this giant plume of white gas spilling out up into the air,” Stickney said. When Low and Stickney were about a mile away from the geyser, they said the Tahoe’s real-time methane reading shot up – a sign they were in the chemical plume downwind from the exploding well. The smell grew so strong as they were trying to take an air sample that it became hard to breathe, they said.
“The smell just quickly got worse,” said Low. “Just … your body telling you, ‘OK, stop breathing. This isn’t good for you.’”
“When I breathed it in, my eyes started watering, I started coughing,” Stickney said.
Even at the edge of the plume, a mile from the blowout site, subsequent analysis of the sample showed the carcinogen benzene at about 35 parts per billion, said Emily Fischer, a professor of atmospheric science at CSU.
Anyone breathing that amount of benzene for an hour – say the plume settled over their house – would be exposed between four and 10 times beyond what common safety thresholds allow, Fischer said.
The results also came back with elevated levels of hexane, toluene, and xylene. But because trade secret chemicals weren’t disclosed for the Bishop well pad, the students – and other nearby residents – can’t know exactly what else was in the toxic plume.
“This just kind of proves that you need to be transparent about what you’re putting in those wells,” Stickley said. “Because when incidents like this happen, people don’t know what they’re breathing, they don’t know what’s going into the air. That’s a problem for the workers. That’s a problem for the local residents. It’s a problem for everybody.”
Chevron said its own air quality testing had a different result.
“Air monitoring continues in and around the area surrounding the site and the community, and all measurements that we have received from the laboratories have been below levels of concern,” said Beasley, Chevron’s spokesperson, in her statement. “Chevron cannot speculate on data that we have not received or reviewed.”
The continued non-disclosure of secret chemicals in Colorado’s wells has become an even more urgent issue in the aftermath of the disaster blow out, said Barbara Donachy, an artist and environmental activist on the board of PSR Colorado.
“A public health alert would have been different had they known all the chemicals that were in that well,” she said.
But Donachy said ECMC hadn’t even created a publicly available website devoted to the disclosures until December 2024, after she filed a public records request.
At the same time, Allison said it’s likely the topline figure in their analysis – at least 30m lbs of secret chemicals pumped since July 2023 – is just a partial picture of the total. Though the FracFocus database only features data on extraction fluid chemicals, Colorado law additionally mandates disclosure of chemicals used in drilling fluid – which routinely includes PFAS compounds as a lubricant. As of this writing, ECMC has not posted any chemical disclosures related to drilling. ECMC did not answer the Guardian’s question about whether it believes that drilling fluids are also covered under the disclosure rules.
Colorado operators have drilled at over 1,200 sites since December 2023, Allison said. The report calls this “woefully inadequate” compliance, and argues that ECMC must hold companies and their suppliers accountable. Under the 2022 law, ECMC can issue fines of between $200 and $15,000 a day for not complying with the chemical disclosure rules. At a conservative $200 per day, the non-compliant companies would have already racked up over $37m in fees, the analysis found – enough to pay the annual salaries of more than 500 Colorado teachers.
In its response to the Guardian, ECMC’s Kemp said “our staff first attempts to work cooperatively with operators”. though operators that remain non-compliant will face penalties.
Colorado state representative Meg Froelich, who co-sponsored the 2022 legislation, expressed frustration at the slow pace of enforcement.
“You put in the elbow grease, and you deploy community and advocates against a pretty powerful lobby,” she said. “It doesn’t feel good when they’re so easily able to just do whatever they want anyway.”
Hawkins, who lives just a few miles from where the Bishop pad geyser erupted in Galeton, said she hoped that the incident would finally force ECMC to be more proactive. “If Galeton doesn’t get this state to do something,” she said, “what will?”
