Texas Advances Its Fracking Disclosure Rules

Scott Detrow / StateImpactPA

A Brad­ford County drilling rig

It’s been a big week for state-level frack­ing dis­clo­sure. The same day Col­orado approved a new reg­u­la­tion requir­ing energy com­pa­nies to dis­close chem­i­cals used dur­ing hydraulic frac­tur­ing, Texas’ Rail­road Com­mis­sion final­ized the Lone Star State’s new guidelines.

Ear­lier this year, Texas became the first state to pass a law requir­ing drillers to pro­vide a list of chem­i­cals used dur­ing frack­ing. (The six other states with sim­i­lar man­dates put theirs in place through the reg­u­la­tory process.) The leg­is­la­ture left it to the Rail­road Com­mis­sion, which reg­u­lates energy issues, to fill in the details.

Our part­ners at StateIm­pact Texas report:

The Rail­road Com­mis­sion of Texas, which over­sees drilling in the state, passed new rules requir­ing the dis­clo­sure of chem­i­cals used in hydraulic frac­tur­ing (“frack­ing”) today. The rules were pro­posed by the state leg­is­la­ture ear­lier this year and signed into law by Gov­er­nor Rick Perry this sum­mer. Com­pa­nies will have to dis­close on the web­site Frac­Fo­cus what chem­i­cals they use for frack­ing in Texas.

Any wells that have an ini­tial drilling per­mit from Feb­ru­ary 1, 2012 on will have to make the dis­clo­sure. The com­mis­sion notes in a release that “before the rule passed, Texas oper­a­tors con­duct­ing hydraulic frac­tur­ing were vol­un­tar­ily enter­ing chem­i­cal data into the pub­lic web­site Frac­Fo­cus for about half of all wells in Texas under­go­ing hydraulic frac­tur­ing,” the com­mis­sion said in a statement.

Penn­syl­va­nia requires com­pa­nies to pro­vide the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion with well-specific chem­i­cal lists, but the infor­ma­tion is kept pri­vate, and can only be released through the Right-To-Know process. Both impact fees in front of the Gen­eral Assem­bly would over­haul this sys­tem, and cre­ate a pub­lic web­site list­ing each well’s chemicals.

Begin­ning next month, com­pa­nies who are mem­bers of the Mar­cel­lus Shale Coali­tion will vol­un­tar­ily list their chem­i­cals at FracFocus.org, which has become a national clear­ing­house for frack­ing chem­i­cal information.