Big Government Gets More Heavy-Handed

E-Mail to Congress:

EIN News says, "Other Energy Issues Seep Into Spill Legislation. Energy legislation advancing in the Senate would force companies to reveal closely held details about the chemical cocktails they use to extract natural gas from shale rock, imposing the first federal regulation on hydraulic fracturing. (chron.com)."

This is a sample of what I mean when I talk about hiding sneaky stuff in legislation.

In this case, we're talking about "proprietary know-how". While we have a nice Patent/Trademark law, government and industry have recognized that corporations and private individuals have a right to secrecy in chemical formulations. An example of this recognition is in the Manufacturer's Safety Data Sheets, which are government mandated for all chemical compositions either offered to the public or used in the environment. For the MSDS, it is sufficient to designate a formulation by trademark without indicating specific chemical compositions, providing toxicity and environmental data showing that all constituents are essentially innocuous.

Forcing corporations and individuals to reveal inapplicable details of their "know-how" would be a significant change from current accepted practice and could be considered an infraction on personal rights. Government is not known for its reliability in retaining confidential information belonging to others. In fact, it has difficulty in avoiding leaks of its own information. The fact that the bill specifically requests the composition of hydraulic fracturing material, may also imply that someone in the federal government anticipates being able to obtain the information and subsequently sell it to industry competitors.

For those who may distrust the submitted MSDS toxicity and environmental data, I would like to remind them that we have in these days very effective analytical techniques. If government feels it needs to know an exact chemical composition of a formulation, it always has the option of a laboratory analysis.

This consideration of chemical cocktails in hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is not grossly significant in itself. It is just another step of imposition of big government on the rights of corporations and individuals.