Gas Execs Ready to Disclose
What’s in that fracking fluid?
(Narrowsburg, NY) The River Reporter
29 October 2009
By Fritz Mayer
UNITED STATES — It’s reportedly lethal enough to kill livestock, send
adults into intensive care and make children ill. Since the beginning
of the gas rush in the Upper Delaware Valley, environmentalists have
been saying that the impacts of fracking can’t be studied unless the
ingredients of fracking fluids are known. It looks increasingly as if
some high rollers in the business are beginning to accept the notion of
disclosure of the ingredients as not only inevitable but also
understandable.
On October 23, the CEO of the world’s largest oilfield services
company, Schlumberger Ltd., had a conference call with analysts and
said he expects new regulations concerning the process of hydraulic
fracturing are coming because of growing public concerns about water
contamination. Andrew Gold said, “I’m pretty sure that there will be
some form of new regulation in order to satisfy the authorities and the
public’s desire to know that what is being done is safe. And that seems
to me a perfectly natural thing to want.”
The statement came in the wake of other similar public pronouncements
by other executives on the same topic. According to Reuters News
Agency, Aubrey McClendon, chairman and CEO of Chesapeake Energy
Corporation, the largest gas drilling company in the United States,
said at an energy conference in late September, “We, as an industry,
need to demystify [hydraulic fracturing]. We need to disclose the
chemicals that we are using and search for alternatives to the
chemicals we are using.”
At the same conference, John Pinkerton, the CEO of another large
drilling company, Range Resources, said that his company has contracts
with the companies such as Schlumberger and Haliburton that contain
nondisclosure agreements regarding fracking fluids. But he called those
agreements “silly,” and said that he has told those companies that the
status quo is no longer acceptable.
The executives are speaking out about the matter as legislation at the
state and federal level would make disclosure of fracking ingredients
mandatory.
Nationally, lawmakers in Washington are working to pass the Fracturing
Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, or FRAC act, which would
end the exemption of fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act and
require disclosure of fracking ingredients.
At the state level, the recommendations put forward by the New York
State Department of Environmentalregarding new rules being considered
for gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, would require the ingredients
be revealed as part of the permitting process.