By “holes” in FracFocus, we mean features of FracFocus that undermine the transparency and completeness of the registry. In some cases this may be an explicit masking of information. In other cases, a hole may be a process by which disclosures are generated that implicitly leaves out chemicals. In still others, substantial ambiguity may be intrinsic to the materials used by the companies and even in how much companies can know about the materials they inject into the ground.
We distinguish these “holes” from error and data omissions that we report elsewhere. While the latter could be corrected by companies, these holes are at least partially baked into the FracFocus system.
We have written about FracFocus absences at the FracTracker blog and have an academic paper in press. This page will serve as a general explainer and jump-off spot to more in-depth explanations of specific “holes”. We will fill out this page as we develop those explanations.
For now, we start with: