DENVER — Colorado’s governor is proposing new rules requiring oil and gas drillers to publicly disclose the ingredients of their hydraulic fracturing fluids, even though he believes there is almost no chance the fluids are contaminating water wells.
Gov. John Hickenlooper announced the plan today at a Colorado Oil & Gas Association conference in Denver.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves injecting fluids deep underground to make it easier to extract trapped oil and natural gas. However, the process has become a hot button for some residents and environmentalists who say the process contaminates water wells and causing air pollution – a claim disputed by the energy industry.
Hickenlooper also proposed a voluntary program to test groundwater around oil and gas wells before and after drilling to check for signs of contamination.
He said that testing would be paid for by the industry but performed by a third party. Results would be recorded by the state health department.
Last week, the EPA proposed new regulations of its own that the agency hopes will addresses air pollution problems reported in places such as Wyoming, Texas, Pennsylvania and Colorado, where new drilling techniques have led to a rush to obtain natural gas that was once considered inaccessible. More than 25,000 wells are being drilled each year by “fracking,” a process by which sand, water and chemicals are injected underground to fracture rock so gas can come out.
The proposed regulations are designed to eliminate most releases of smog- and soot-forming pollutants from those wells. New controls on storage tanks, transmission pipelines and other equipment – at both oil and gas drilling sites on land – would reduce by a quarter amounts of cancer-causing air pollution and methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, but also one of the most powerful contributors to global warming.
