Uncovering Fracking Chemicals with Open-FF

Open-FF is an independent project to transform the FracFocus data into a useful resource for researchers, journalists and community advocates. The open source project has been evolving for several years and FracTracker Alliance has recently started sponsoring the effort.

At its core, Open-FF simply takes the FracFocus data and pairs it with corrections, clarifications, calculations, and alerts that add perspective to the industry’s published data. This core data set is then packaged in a number of ways to make it available online to everyone from the hard-core data analyst to the non-technical casual browser. Two of the most important features of a chemical disclosure are unambiguous chemical identity and quantity.

Chemical Identity

Chemicals in FracFocus are disclosed with two identifiers: a name and a CAS Registry Number® (the Chemical Abstract Service assigns authoritative identifiers for materials).  Unfortunately, there are often errors in one or both of these identifiers and they can even be conflicting.  Where possible, Open-FF clarifies the identities; when not possible, it flags problem records. There are currently over 1,300 materials identified.

Most of those chemicals will be unfamiliar to users and FracFocus has nothing to say about a chemical’s hazards. To help users, Open-FF identifies when a material is a chemical of concern (for example, is on the Clean Water Act list) and includes summaries of toxicity (such as EPA’s ChemInformatics) when available. But the unfortunate reality is that our understanding of the health and environmental impacts of fracking chemicals trails far behind the industry’s introduction of new untested materials. Open-FF is working to develop new ways of helping the public find up-to-date research and perspectives on the potential hazards of fracking chemicals.

Chemical Quantity

FracFocus provides a limited perspective of chemical quantity. For example, when FracFocus presents a chemical’s quantity, it reports the percentage (by weight) of the chemical compared to the overall fracking fluid. So, for the chemical “water,” FracFocus presents something like 85%.  For “sand,” it will probably be something like 14%. The fracking “additives” together are typically less than 1%. The percentages of individual additives are often tiny.  Viewing chemical quantity from only this perspective does indeed make the chemical’s contribution seem insignificant.

However, another way to view chemical quantity is by mass; that is, the absolute weight of the chemical material used. Open-FF uses the FracFocus data to calculate that weight. For example, a typical fracking job in 2022 used 16 million gallons of water. That’s about 130 million pounds of water (1 gallon of water weighs about 8.3 pounds). If we use that typical percentage 85% for water, that means the total fracking fluid weighs about 156 million pounds. One more calculation: a typical percentage of hydrochloric acid is 0.06% of the whole fracking fluid and that translates into over 90,000 pounds of acid, which is hardly insignificant. There are many fracking jobs where hydrochloric acid use is much greater – currently, there are more than 300 fracking jobs in the data set reporting over 1,000,000 pounds of the acid. While a user could calculate those weights directly from the data provided in FracFocus, Open-FF calculates weights for all FracFocus records (where data are sufficient) and users have easy access to those values.