Halliburton fracking info, week 14

Holy crap: Houston, we have a sign of life.

For at least twelve weeks, Halliburton's Web site dedicated to the technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" as this unrepentant Battlestar Galactica fan likes to refer to it, remained unchanged, listing just three of the company's fracking formulations despite the site's plea to "check back often" for new information.

Finally there actually is new information. Halliburton's fracking Web site now lists three formulations from Pennsylvania and three from Texas. However, the geographically vague "Northeast" formulation has vanished; whether it was renamed or removed, I can't tell.

The breakdowns of the mixtures are also different. In the first version fourteen weeks ago, the breakdowns listed the individual components that went into the formula, but didn't specify a percentage for any of them. Now, there's a pie chart showing the percentages by purpose: friction reducer, acid inhibitor, biocide, etc. Also, and more intriguingly, the breakdowns are comprised of two sections: additives and constituents.

Additives, as best I can tell, are the pre-mixed chemical products that are combined, possibly at the drill sites, to form the actual fracking formulations. Each additive has a specific purpose: biocide, acid additive, friction reducer, etc. Many of these additives have trademarked names like "BE-9." The concentration of each additive in the formulation is also listed.

All additives also include a link to the PDF of the additive's U.S. material safety data sheet, or MSDS. The MSDS lays out the substance's hazard characteristics, such as what kind of harm it can do to a human being, how to remediate it, whether its decay products are hazardous, etc.

Constituents, according to the Web site, "are the individual components used to form the additives." The original version of the fracking Web site only listed these constituents and their "common uses"; the common uses were meant to reassure visitors like me of the harmlessness of the ingredients.

The likelihood that constituents' properties change when they're combined into additives makes the "common uses" part of the constituents table almost laughably irrelevant.

Unless you're a chemical engineer, you can't help but wonder about the relationship between "constituents" and "additives." What constituents go into which additives? What chemical changes do constituents undergo when they are mixed or otherwise combined to form an additive? What effects do these changes have on the additive? (As a trivial example, hydrogen and oxygen would be considered the constituents that form the additive called water. Knowing the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, though, tells you nothing about the properties of water.)

Nevertheless, the information about additives is extremely important. The original fracking formulation data listed only what Halliburton now calls constituents and did not specify how these base ingredients were combined. With the trade names and MSDSs of the actual additives, interested third parties have a much clearer context for what Halliburton's formulations are doing and what the consequences are of accidental leakage of these additives into the environment.

Here are the names of the formulations.

Pennsylvania:

• Pennsylvania WaterFrac Formulation
• Pennsylvania HybridFrac Formulation
• Pennsylvania FoamFrac Formulation

Texas:

• South Texas - Eagle Ford Hybrid Formulation
• South Texas - Eagle Ford WaterFrac Formulation
• South Texas - Wilcox Hybrid Formulation

I found a couple of oddities in the formulations information:

• The Eagle Ford WaterFrac Formulation's pie chart percentages only add up to 97.01%, even though the chart itself visually implies the listed ingredients account for the entire formulation. (By the way, the percentages in question are 93.36% water, 2.56% sand, and 1.09% "fluid system," meaning all of the additives. Hydrochloric acid is the main ingredient of the fluid system, accounting for more than three-quarters of it.)
• The Wilcox Hybrid Formulation lists not water as the base fluid, but what seems to be a 4% solution of KCl (potassium chloride) in water. Note that a concentration of sodium chloride (table salt) greater than 1% (presumably in water) is considered hazardous in a U.S. MSDS according to Halliburton's own fracking information. Potassium chloride is similar enough to sodium chloride to be used as a substitute in the human diet, so the 4% KCl solution caught my eye.

Maybe this will turn out to be more than a hollow PR exercise on Halliburton's part. I wonder if the updated information has anything to do with the subpoena the E.P.A. dropped on Halliburton last November.