Jessica Ernst is an environmental consultant in Alberta who has written 93-page report, Brief Review of Threats to Groundwater from the Oil and Gas Industry’s Methane Migration and Hydraulic Fracturing, and it covers a bit of what happened here in Nova Scotia, in 2013.
As Doug Neil mentions in his appeal report that Bromide has shown up in testing, but was never mentioned in the AIS documentation, Jessica says there is a little more to it than that. She quoted the Council of Canadians who say:
“We are alarmed that Colchester County is aware that naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) and the four chemicals in the BTEX group (Benzene, Toluene, Ethyl-Benzene and Xylene) are present in the fracking wastewater and still approvesAIS’ plan.”
Ecology Action Centre: “AIS has given assurances to council of extensive testing of all hydraulic fracturing fluids before the company accepts them for treatment…But the evidence indicates that there was little or no testing of fluids that AIS brought from New Brunswick. Results of testing performed on the fluids in the Triangle Petroleum Kennetcook waste ponds have been secured and made publicly available through Freedom of Information. These analyses were made available to AIS, but are only for a very limited number of chemical compounds. AIS also received from Triangle the manifests for all the chemical compounds used in the hydraulic fracturing- but the amounts used are not given, and cannot be calculated.”
You can download Jessica’s whole report in pdf format here, although Nova Scotia only gets this small mention on page 33. It would seem that AIS is withholding data including the mystery 4% of the solution that they refuse to disclose. There are other chemicals that should have been identified and tested for, but it looks like this got covered up instead.