Update: On Oct 24, 2024, we detected that Occidental had removed the disclosures with these extreme water volumes and submitted four new disclosures. Unfortunately, changing only the water volume is a faulty fix. While the new disclosures have water volumes that are more typical (17-22 million gallons), the company did not adjust the other values in the disclosure that are related to the water volume: PercentHFJob and MassIngredient. For example, the new disclosure for well number 3001547204 reports 7.97 billion pounds of water. That corresponds to the original mistake of 940 million gallons.
Users who view these disclosures at FracFocus (see links in the table below) will find the corrected water volume, but an erroneous PercentHFJob value (greater than 99 %) along with other PercentHFJob values (such as sand) as far too small.
Occidental Oil and Gas, LLC, reported massive water use in four New Mexico fracking disclosures1 this month. Water is the primary ingredient in fracking jobs and is used to carry sand and other ingredients to depth. Under high pressure, this fluid fractures the rock which releases the fossil fuel target.
To get a perspective on how large these new water uses are, consider Occidental’s previous reports. The first figure illustrates how much water was used in each fracking job by this company in the past few years (excluding the most recent disclosures). The median volume of water used (in red) about 18 million gallons.2
But adding those 4 new disclosures to the figure illustrates how extreme they are, each over 700 million gallons3:
Details of the 4 disclosures
This table details those four disclosures. Occidental reports the water was “Produced water” that it supplied. Click on the API number link to see the official FracFocus disclosure page. Occidental published these four New Mexico fracking disclosures around July 3, 2024.
| Job end date | Total Base Water Volume (gallons) | API Number and link |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-06-19 | 938,067,400 | 30015472040000 |
| 2024-06-08 | 714,759,800 | 30015471860000 |
| 2024-06-18 | 746,917,200 | 30015472030000 |
| 2024-06-08 | 753,207,300 | 30015471870000 |
It is not unusual for FracFocus disclosures to contain large errors. Such errors severely distort the data of the rest of the disclosures and undermines the integrity of FracFocus in general. In addition, at least three of these disclosures don’t list enough details about the chemical additives to represent the trade-named products listed. For example, in 30015471870000, Occidental lists four separate additive products4 in the products section and yet, the company reports only two chemicals in the ingredients section5.
We have reported these disclosures to Occidental Oil and Gas through FracFocus support6. We monitor changes to disclosures and we will update this post if Occidental modifies these disclosures.
- These are fracking chemical disclosures that companies are required to submit to FracFocus. This webpage report is part of the independent project, Open-FF, that aims to make the FracFocus data more accessible to interested parties. ↩︎
- The median is 17.75 million gallons and is illustrated by the red line in the figure. ↩︎
- To put this in perspective, the water reported in each of these 4 disclosures is larger that any other of the 200,000+ disclosures by 250 million gallons. ↩︎
- These are the trade-named products like “LD-2900” supplied by MultiChem that should each have a list of chemical components. There should be at least one chemical in the chemicals section for each product. ↩︎
- View these sections in the PDF version of the disclosure, available at the link. ↩︎
- FracFocus cannot release the contact information for the people responsible for the company’s disclosure, but have offered to forward our messages to them. ↩︎