Despite new law, Colorado oil and gas companies still get away with secrecy

Oct 24, 2025  By Quentin Young newsfromthestates.com

The Colorado officials entrusted with keeping residents safe from oil and gas production don’t think a recent safety law says what it says. And that’s only one troubling part of the larger story about how companies have avoided compliance with the law.

Enacted in 2022, the law requires oil and gas companies to reveal what toxic chemicals they’re putting into the ground. What they’ve disclosed so far only emphasizes the law’s importance — we now know they’re using fracking chemicals that are banned in the state.

Coloradans have good reason to suspect that what they’ve failed to disclose is also a catalogue of health hazards. State regulators have been slow to ensure compliance, and they’ve interpreted the law in a way that lets companies conceal some of the chemicals they use. Their role is to protect the health of Coloradans, but their performance does more to protect the profits of industry.

Oil and gas operators and the chemical vendors they work with are required to disclose to the state the chemicals they use in underground extraction operations, according to the law. Fracking, the process of “fracturing” geologic formations to release trapped oil and gas, involves the injection underground of high-pressure fluid that typically contains water, sand and other substances. Those other substances can be toxic, and even prohibited, but companies previously could conceal their presence by designating them as “trade secrets.”

The new Colorado law changed that. As Capital & Main reported this week, the measure is among the first of its kind in the country to eliminate the trade secret loophole, and it has started to yield results. Disclosures show that oil and gas companies in Colorado — the fourth largest oil producer and eighth largest natural gas producer in the country — have long been using state-banned chemicals, including the cancer-causing 1,4-Dioxane.

The disclosures were slow to come. The law went into effect more than two years ago, but a watchdog report in May found that most oil and gas companies, notably Chevron and its subsidiaries, had not complied.

“It appears that at least 30 million pounds of chemicals injected into over 600 of the state’s oil and gas wells during the first 21 months covered by the law should have been disclosed, but were not,” said the authors of the report, which was released by Physicians for Social Responsibility, PSR Colorado, Colorado Sierra Club, and FracTracker Alliance.

Release of the report appears to have encouraged greater compliance, and the disclosures are starting to force transparency. For example, they show that quaternary ammonium compounds were used at 59 sites over the last 15 months. Those banned substances pose health risks for children and pregnant women.

But there remains a huge compliance gap. State regulators interpret the disclosure law to apply to fluids used in fracking a well but not in drilling a well. That interpretation defies not only the intent of the law according to supporters but also its plain language.

The law’s own declaration of intent refers to chemicals “used by operators during the drilling and (fracking)” of wells, and it says it applies to “downhole operations.”

State regulators at the Energy and Carbon Management Commission base their interpretation on the law’s definition of downhole operations: “oil and gas production operations that are conducted underground.” 

“Neither the statute nor ECMC Rules define ‘production operations,’ but production generally begins after a well is drilled and completed,” Kristin Kemp, spokesperson for the commission, said in an email.

This strains credibility. If the drilling of a hole isn’t a downhole operation then words have no meaning.

State Rep. Meg Froelich knows something about the law’s intent, since she co-sponsored it. She told Newsline this week that drilling fluids are covered, adding that the Legislature might need to adopt another bill to clarify the scope of the disclosure requirement.

The health of community members is at stake. Drilling fluid, like fracking fluid, can also include toxic chemicals, but it can more easily contaminate ground water, as well as air and soil. 

The history of noncompliance with the disclosure law fits a decades-long pattern in which oil and gas companies avoid safety measures while state regulators appear feckless or complicit. As production expands in the state and increasingly runs up against growing communities, industry hazards threaten a greater swath of the population.

Coloradans need state leaders more than ever to protect them from those hazards.