Nick Snow
Washington Editor
One week before a US Department of Energy secretarial advisory subcommittee was scheduled to open a 2-day meeting to discuss hydraulic fracturing questions, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality issued three new fracing regulations.
The rules, which the state’s DEQ announced on May 25, require well operators to document where they plan to get the fresh water used in the state agency’s water withdrawal tool to ensure that neither surface water nor neighboring water wells are affected, and to report the total fracing water volumes recovered.
Operators also must disclose all Material Safety Data Sheets, which list characteristics of fracing fluid chemical additives and their potential health and environmental effects, and post the information on DEQ’s web site for public review.
They also must submit service company fracing records and associated charts showing fracing volumes, rates, and pressures.
The state has always been sensitive to ground and surface water issues, explained Harold R. Fitch, chief of DEQ’s Office of Geological Survey. It began regulating oil and gas in 1927, 2 years after the first commercial production there, he told OGJ in a May 31 phone interview.
“It’s not hydraulic fracturing itself. There are no known instances where the process has communicated directly with an aquifer,” Fitch said. “The issues have been well construction and wastewater disposal, which is not a new issue but involves much higher volumes with fracing.”
Water diversions
Potential water diversion impacts have been a Great Lakes basin issue for some time, so Michigan’s DEQ developed its tool for users to measure potential effects, he said. Oil and gas operators were initially exempt, but one of the May 25 rules now requires them to use it and, if they can’t overcome identified problems, get water from another source.
Other states are moving ahead with new fracing requirements. As Fitch spoke with OGJ, Texas Railroad Commission Chairwoman Elizabeth Ames Jones announced that the agency she leads will begin to develop its own new frac fluid chemical ingredient disclosure rules.
“I expect any rule to formalize best practices while protecting proprietary information,” Jones said. While federal law protects such information in some cases, the material safety data sheets Michigan requires include several additive compound names so regulators and emergency responders know which chemicals they’re actually dealing with, Fitch noted.
Jones was scheduled to testify during the DOE subcommittee’s second day of hearings on June 2. So was Fitch, who observed that the meeting was taking place on short notice. “That wasn’t a problem,” he said. “We’ve been dealing with hydraulic fracturing for some time, so we have all the information at our fingertips.”
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