THE CASE AGAINST HYDROFRACKING - Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 70

But disclosure remains a sticking point. In Texas, legislators passed the nation's
first rules requiring public disclosure of fracking chemicals. 100 Designed to pro-
mote transparency, the rules were held up as a model for the rest of the country.
Yet few drillers complied. Between April 2011 and early December 2012, Texas
drillers used terms such as “secret,” “confidential,” or “proprietary” 10,120 times
out of 12,410 hydraulic fractures reported to FracFocus, according to the Austin
Statesman . In the Eagle Ford Shale, the major oil and gas play in south Texas, the
trade secret exemption was used 2,297 times out of 3,100 hydraulic fractures. “I
think it's a loophole big enough you can drive a frack truck through,” observed
Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas. “If the companies argue that frack-
ing is safe, why are they hiding behind these trade secret loopholes? If you're going
to the doctor, you want to know what you might have been exposed to.” 101
In 2013 Ken Salazar, then secretary of the interior, reiterated that while the
Obama administration is preparing to open public lands to fracking, “there has to
be disclosure” of chemicals used in the process. “People need to know what's being
injected into the underground. I tell people in the oil and gas industry that unless
they embrace … disclosure, that it'll be the Achilles Heel of their industry.” 102