Colorado fracking sand errors

Summary: FracFocus disclosures that misreport sand and water percentages undermine the integrity of the fracking chemical data. Open-FF¹ found 82 such disclosures in Colorado by 25 operators and we summarize them here.

The typical relationship between water and sand throughout FracFocus is about 88% to 11%. As we explored in previous posts, we have found a large number of disclosures that are very different from that typical water-dominated profile. Instead, companies report that sand dominates the fracking job. These are most likely errors and are often associated with other errors. (We note that these are disclosures without carbon dioxide or nitrogen gases, which may have slightly higher percentages.)

The operators with the most disclosures on this list are:

Operator Name
Noble Energy, Inc.             13
Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc.    11
PDC Energy                      8

The following table lists individual sand-dominated disclosures found in a FracFocus download from Aug. 17, 2024. Although the topic of previous posts was those disclosures with greater than 50% sand, we include disclosures that are greater than 40%. We do this because, statistically, a value of 42.5% sand has a z-score over 3.0 and is generally considered an outlier. Users of these data may want to look more carefully at these marginal values.

We map these Colorado disclosures below. Click on numbered circles to zoom to clusters of fracking jobs. Click on markers to reveal specifics about the job.

FracFocus Support has indicated that they will alert companies to the sand-dominance issues and we hope companies will correct these disclosures. The status of these disclosures shown in this report is a snapshot (Aug 2024) and hopefully will be corrected. Open-FF is keeping a running tally of all such FracFocus disclosures and we note when they are corrected. To see the most updated status of Colorado sand-dominated records, visit this link.

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Photo citation: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2020.(modified by author)

1.  Open-FF is a public service project, independent of FracFocus, that aims to foster better understanding of chemical uses of the fracking industry by organizing and analyzing chemical disclosures of FracFocus. To see state-specific information about Colorado, visit this page. ↩︎