The Sierra Club: “Oil and Gas Companies Routinely Frack With ‘Trade Secret’ Chemicals, Including PFAS”

A year-long investigation sheds new light on how communities and regulators are kept in the dark
By Jonathan Hahn | Feb 9 2022

“Peggy Tibbetts stopped drinking the tap water at her home in Silt, Colorado, 13 years ago. Silt, located in Garfield County, is surrounded by oil and gas wells; in every direction, there is a well pad within just a few miles of Tibbetts’s home. The town gets its water from the Colorado River, downstream from the West Divide Creek tributary, where two well pads blew up in 2004 causing a benzene seep. When Tibbetts’s health began to deteriorate in 2013, she suspected the toxic air emissions from fracking operations were the cause.

“We’ve always known that there are dangerous chemicals being used, but we weren’t allowed to know what they are,” she told Sierra.

Oil and gas companies routinely withhold from regulators and the public the identities of chemicals used in drilling and fracking operations by claiming that the names of those chemicals are a trade secret. Now, a report by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) sheds new light on how residents like Tibbetts are potentially being exposed to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge, including PFAS, a proven carcinogen. The report provides a more precise picture of how much PFAS has been used in the last 10 years in Colorado—though the actual numbers could be much greater. “