A Company's Chemical-Free Fracking Laced With Myth

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

September 13, 2012 | 3:30 PM

It’s not as blatant as those emails from Nigeria asking you for your bank account information in order for a mysterious stranger to “wire you money.” But it does seem like some freaky fracking claims may be swindling investors. EnergyWire reports on a company called Chimera Energy, otherwise known as the fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology that sports a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. Chimera’s website says the name refers to a “multi-faceted” existence.

“For weeks, a company called Chimera Energy Corp. has been issuing news releases touting the emergence of its “exothermic non-hydraulic extraction” technology. The firm says the process eliminates the need to use chemically treated water to extract oil and gas locked in tight underground formations, and in releases Chimera says it’s moving to test the technology in Mexico through a contract with that nation’s state-owned energy giant, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex.
However, communications with Pemex officials turn up no record of any such contract with any company named Chimera Energy, or with that company’s sole executive, listed on Chimera’s website as Charles Grob.”

The article points to lots of blog chatter about possible fraud.

Chimera says on its website that its process can be traced to methods first developed in China as a means to enable enhanced oil and gas extraction in colder climates, where hydraulic fracturing fluids can be expected to freeze. In a video overview, the company explains that its method uses “extreme heat metal oxide exothermic reactions in conjunction with ultra-expansive evaporants to open both old and new oil and gas producing fissures.”