But it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when the environmental attorney Rob Bilott sued DuPont for pollution from its Teflon plant in Parkersburg, W.Va., that the dangers of PFAS started to be widely known. Industry researchers have long been aware of their toxicity. Both Congress and the Biden administration have moved to better regulate PFAS, which contaminate the drinking water of as many as 80 million Americans. The substances have come under scrutiny in recent years for their tendency to persist in the environment, and to accumulate inside the human body, as well as for their links to health problems like cancer and birth defects. The presence of PFAS in oil and gas extraction threatens to expose oil-field employees and emergency workers handling fires and spills as well as people who live near, or downstream from, drilling sites to a class of chemicals that has faced increasing scrutiny for its links to cancer, birth defects, and other serious health problems.Ī class of man-made chemicals that are toxic even in minuscule concentrations, for decades PFAS were used to make products like nonstick pans, stain-resistant carpeting and firefighting foam.
But Chemours, which was spun off from DuPont in 2015, has not spoken publicly about the use of these chemicals in drilling and fracking.Īn Exxon spokesman, in response to questions regarding whether it uses the chemicals, said, “We do not manufacture PFAS.” that it had failed to report information about the health and environmental effects of PFAS, in the largest administrative penalty the agency had ever imposed at the time. In 2005, DuPont also agreed to pay $16 million to settle allegations by the E.P.A. The Biden administration had made addressing PFAS a top priority, he added, for example by proposing a rule to require all manufacturers and importers of PFAS since 2011 to disclose more information on the chemicals, including their environmental and health effects.Ĭhemours, which has in the past agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle injury claims related to PFOA pollution, declined to comment. He said the redactions in the documents were mandated by a statute protecting confidential business information. spokesman, said that the chemicals in question were approved a decade ago, and that amendments to laws since then now required the agency to affirm the safety of new chemicals before they are allowed into the marketplace. “This isn’t something I was aware of,” said Tony Choate, a Chickasaw Nation spokesman. Nine of those wells were in Carter County, Okla., within the boundaries of Chickasaw Nation. Because not all states require companies to report chemicals to the database, the number of wells could be higher. But the FracFocus database, which tracks chemicals used in fracking, shows that about 120 companies used PFAS - or chemicals that can break down into PFAS, the most common of which was “nonionic fluorosurfactant” and various misspellings - in more than 1,000 wells between 20 in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Wyoming. There is no public data that details where the E.P.A.-approved chemicals have been used. Even the name of the company that applied for approval is redacted, and the records give only a generic name for the chemicals: fluorinated acrylic alkylamino copolymer. documents describing the chemicals approved in 2011 date from the Obama administration and are heavily redacted because the agency allows companies to invoke trade-secret claims to keep basic information on new chemicals from public release. In 2008, a scientific paper published in an oil-industry journal and led by a DuPont researcher referred to the “exceptional” water-repelling and other characteristics of types of chemicals that include PFAS, and called the chemicals an “emerging technology” that showed promise for use in oil and gas extraction. identified serious health risks associated with chemicals proposed for use in oil and gas extraction, and yet allowed those chemicals to be used commercially with very lax regulation,” said Dusty Horwitt, researcher at Physicians for Social Responsibility.įor fracking to work, the energy industry has an appetite for chemicals that, when pumped underground at high pressure, can coax oil out of the ground most efficiently.
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