You wouldn't think so, would you? I mean, danger to the public health, danger to first responders, etc. & so forth.

But this is happening all over the country, and the Oil Barons are pretty powerful guys. And there is more than one way to skin a cat. In texas, for example, while they didn't write a requirement for secrecy into the law, the way North Carolina did, they did something just as debilitating:

A subsidiary of Nabors Industries Ltd. (NBR) pumped a mixture of chemicals identified only as “EXP- F0173-11” into a half-dozen oil wells in rural Karnes County, Texas, in July.

Few people outside Nabors, the largest onshore drilling contractor by revenue, know exactly what’s in that blend. This much is clear: One ingredient, an unidentified solvent, can cause damage to the kidney and liver, according to safety information about the product that Michigan state regulators have on file.

A year-old Texas law that requires drillers to disclose chemicals they pump underground during hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” was powerless to compel transparency for EXP- F0173-11. The solvent and several other ingredients in the product are considered a trade secret by Superior Well Services, the Nabors subsidiary. That means they’re exempt from disclosure.

Drilling companies in Texas, the biggest oil-and-natural gas producing state, claimed similar exemptions about 19,000 times this year through August, according to their chemical- disclosure reports. Data from the documents were compiled by Pivot Upstream Group, a Houston-based firm that studies the energy industry, and analyzed by Bloomberg News. Nationwide, companies withheld one out of every five chemicals they used in fracking, a separate examination of a broader database shows.

Trade-secret exemptions block information on more than five ingredients for every well in Texas, undermining the statute’s purpose of informing people about chemicals that are hauled through their communities and injected thousands of feet beneath their homes and farms, said Lon Burnam, a Democratic state representative and a co-author of the law.

“This disclosure bill has a hole big enough to drive a Mack truck through,” Burnam says of the law, which he called “much compromised legislation.”

“Is it meaningless because there are so many exemptions?” he asked. “I’m afraid it may be.”

The Texas disclosure bill marks a growing effort by the oil and gas industry to address public concerns about fracking, a drilling technique in which millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground to free up more hydrocarbons. While the method has unlocked vast new sources of energy, safety questions center on the hundreds of chemicals used -- many of them known carcinogens. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has little authority to regulate fracking; Congress decided in 2005 that the bureau wouldn’t oversee the practice.


Pretty slick, no?

Texas is one of many states that has a law allowing oil companies to use eminent domain to seize lands for pipelines. This includes foreign oil companies such as TransCanada (Reason num 14 why we shouldn't build the XL Pipeline.)

TransCanada has used eminent domain on another part of the pipeline route (NYTimes). In a 2012 ruling, Texas Judge Bill Harris HRS +0.25% of Lamar County upheld TransCanada’s takeover by eminent domain of a strip of land across Julia Trigg Crawford’s pasture in Paris, Texas to build part of its Keystone XL pipeline. The ruling was delivered in a 15-word text message sent from the Judge’s iPhone, demonstrating the seriousness with which the Judge handled such a constitutionally-charged case. Not sure if that ruling is a first in judicial history, but I guess it was better than a Tweet.