After several years of collaboration among regulatory experts from across the country, the Groundwater Protection Council (GWPC), recently published a set of 136 “Regulatory Elements” intended to provide regulators with ideas to consider when improving oversight of the permitting, construction, operation and plugging of oil and gas wells. This may sound dry, but regulations addressing […]

Last fall, a massive leak from a natural gas storage facility in California’s Aliso Canyon released nearly 100,000 tons of methane pollution into the atmosphere — the largest uncombusted release of this potent greenhouse gas in U.S. history, and seen by many as the industry’s worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill. Facilities like […]

This May has truly been a banner month for transparency of the oil and gas industry.  To start, FracFocus, the state-run, national hydraulic fracturing chemical disclosure database, released chemical information of nearly 100,000 wells in raw digital format. On the same day, Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) put two key datasets online that […]

The identity of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluid has been a key policy issue since the beginning of the shale revolution a decade ago.  Now, that chemical information just became publicly available in a whole new way. Today, FracFocus, the nationwide state-run hydraulic fracturing chemical registry database, made its chemical data publicly available […]