In addition to sand and water, hydraulic fracturing fluids contain various combinations of chemical additives.
They are used to kill bacteria, prevent corrosion, and inhibit the build up of scale and deposits inside pipes.
Additionally, friction reducers and surfactants are added to make the solution easier to pump over long distances through small spaces.
These chemicals, in simple terms, make the frack solution go further by making it slippery—a process known in the industry as a “slickwater frack.”
Some fracking additives are caustic, poisonous, or explosive. Although the exact chemical recipes are publicly unavailable, they are broken down for New York State regulatory purposes into a dozen broad chemical classifications, each with a dozen or more subgroups.
They include alcohols and glycol ethers, petroleum distillates, aromatic hydrocarbons, and microbiocides. Some of these agents, such as the glycol ethers, are common components of antifreeze. Microbiocides include Dazomet, commonly used as a soil fumigation pesticide; and aromatic hydrocarbons contain benzene, toluene, and xylene, which are toxic and carcinogenic.

Sewage treatment plants, struggling to fund upgrades to meet federal discharge requirements that were growing more stringent by the year, were not equipped to test for, much less handle, the kind of waste coming from these new wells. The metals and solvents were one issue. Another was the salts, sands, and other suspended and dissolved matter that could overload municipal or natural systems. Wells also produced radioactive material, liquid and solid, for which the treatment plants had no testing protocol.