Proprietary Chemicals in the FracFocus Database: Studying Absences, Inconsistencies, and Omissions

• In Event: Encounters with Failure in STS I

Abstract

Scientific research coupled with increasing public concern about the human and environmental impacts of fracking has led to partial disclosures of chemicals via an industry-sponsored database called FracFocus, established in 2011. FracFocus was designed to inform the public about fracking and provide oil and gas adjacent communities with information about the fracking chemicals used on or near their homes. FracFocus is notably a private website not subject to federal record laws, and all data is self-reported by individual companies. This paper considers how the absence of information from the database FracFocus can itself be studied as an object of empirical analysis. In particular, it examines how oilfield service companies benefit from intellectual property laws that permit the withholding of information about chemicals that companies deem as “proprietary” or as “trade secrets”, at their discretion. Building on prior works by Wylie (2018), Kinchy and Schaffer (2018), and Frickel (2014), we conduct a “big data” analysis of the presence, quantity, and locations of proprietary chemical records disclosed to FracFocus across 25 states over a ten year period, using an open-source version of the database called Open-FF. We take an agnotological approach to interrogate the construction of ignorance and legally sanctioned omissions in FracFocus data, seeking to generate new narratives for allocating corporate responsibility and accountability for previously opaque forms of chemical violence associated with fracking.

Authors

• Grace Poudrier, Northeastern University

• Sara Wylie, Northeastern University