Gov. Jared Polis Thursday signed legislation that requires manufacturers and users of hydraulic fracking chemicals to disclose to the state each chemical in their products.

The new law mandates that the list of ingredients be made available on a publicly accessible website, which the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission is tasked with developing.

Under House Bill 22-1348, the required information includes the trade name of the chemical product, a list of the names of each chemical in the product, the estimated amount of each chemical, and a description of the intended purpose of each chemical in the formulation.

Manufacturers and end users must also provide a declaration that the chemical product contains no intentionally added perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) chemicals, the so-called forever chemicals used in many consumer products and industrial applications.

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The law still allows manufacturers to make trade-secret claims and the COGCC may exempt them from public disclosure after examining the claims. However, the full list of chemicals must be disclosed to the COGCC to petition for a trade-secret exemption.

The Sierra Club criticized the exemption.

“Colorado requires reporting of chemicals used in fracking, but it allows generous exemptions,” the group said, citing data from the Physicians for Social Responsibility that, since 2011, operators of more than 12,000 wells in Colorado have “invoked secrecy claims.”

“This issue has been reignited by national reporting that highly toxic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or ‘PFAS’ were used in fracking wells,” the Sierra Club said. “The widespread use of secrecy claims at Colorado’s fracking sites means that it is impossible to gauge if PFAS and other highly toxic chemicals have been used in the state.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s trade association and research organization, told The Denver Gazette that drillers in Colorado do not use PFAS in drilling fluids.

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The law also requires that before beginning fracking operations the operator must notify “communities near where downhole operations will be conducted, local public water administrators, and, if there is a high-priority habitat near where downhole operations are being conducted, the division of parks and wildlife.”

Testifying before a legislative committee in May, Lynn Granger, executive director for API Colorado, opposed the bill in part, arguing it creates a duplicate of the existing national hydraulic fracturing chemical registry, FracFocus.org, which is managed by the Ground Water Protection Council, a conservation and environmental protection organization whose members include state government officials. Granger said Colorado already works closely with the group.

FracFocus was created in part due to regulations promulgated in 2011 by former Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration.

Today, FracFocus says it receives reports from more than 1,600 companies on chemicals for more than 189,000 hydraulic fracturing operations nationwide.

Granger said the state database is not just duplicative but also underfunded.

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“We remain puzzled by the bill’s fiscal note of only $61,500,” said Granger during the committee hearing. “FracFocus is a multimillion-dollar operation and only tracks chemicals used in HF fluid, not all downhole operations as this bill seeks to do. We simply do not understand how the state intends to accomplish what this bill seeks with that fiscal note.”

According to a 2021 economic analysis by the American Petroleum Institute (API), oil and gas extraction in Colorado supported 340,000 total jobs, or 8.6% of Colorado’s workforce, provided $34.1 billion in labor income and contributed $46.1 billion to Colorado’s gross domestic product.

Fracking fluids are used to assist in fracturing underground rock structures to free up oil and natural gas.

After a well is drilled and steel casings are installed and pressure-tested, a slurry of sand, fracking fluids and water are injected into the well bore at extremely high pressures that create a web of small cracks in the surrounding rock.

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The sand in the slurry enters the cracks and, in effect, props them open to increase the flow of gas and oil. The fracking chemicals help lubricate the flow of sand and perform other functions thousands of feet underground in the oil producing layers.

API insists there are no instances of fracking chemicals escaping and contaminating water supplies in Colorado.

Developments in horizontal drilling and fracking technology have dramatically increased U.S. output of both natural gas and oil, leading to the U.S. becoming a net exporter and the world’s No. 1 producer of both in recent years, according to the Heritage Institute.