What's in the Frac Fluid? FracFocus Data, Finally Decoded

FracFocus is a publicly available registry of hydraulic fracturing disclosures. Operators report the chemicals used in each frac job — name, CAS number, purpose, concentration — to comply with state disclosure requirements. The registry has been collecting this data since 2011.

Millions of job disclosures. Hundreds of thousands of ingredient entries. Publicly available.

Almost nobody analyzes it systematically.

The barrier is the data structure. FracFocus data is useful at the individual well level — if you know the API-14 for a specific well and want to know what was pumped — but cross-well analysis requires joining, deduplicating, and normalizing in ways that the raw downloads were not designed to support. Chemical names appear under multiple spellings. CAS numbers are sometimes missing. Concentration units vary.

WellStrata’s Chemicals Explorer processes FracFocus data across every covered state into a format that’s actually analyzable at scale, and surfaces the patterns that are invisible in the raw disclosures.

Three ways to look at the data

The module is organized into three tabs, each designed to answer a different question.

Operator Comparison

The Operator Comparison tab ranks operators by frac job volume — specifically average water per job (Mbbl), average TVD (ft), job count, and the date range of their disclosures.

Water volume is often the most useful primary metric because it correlates with job size and, to some extent, completion intensity. An operator consistently running 30 Mbbl per job in a basin where peers average 20 Mbbl is making a different set of decisions about completion aggressiveness, and the production data may or may not support the premium.

Clicking an operator opens their chemical profile: a horizontal bar chart showing the average percentage of the frac job for each of their top ingredients. This is where you start to see meaningful differentiation between operators. One operator may rely heavily on friction reducers for slickwater jobs. Another in the same basin may run a hybrid fluid with a significantly higher gel fraction. A third may be an early adopter of a specific scale inhibitor chemistry that others are now copying.

The ingredient composition of a frac job is not commonly discussed publicly, which is exactly why the FracFocus data is interesting — it’s disclosed by regulation, but rarely aggregated.

Ingredient Explorer

The Ingredient Explorer inverts the view: instead of starting with an operator and finding their chemicals, you start with a chemical and find who’s using it.

The full ingredient table shows every substance that appears in FracFocus disclosures for the filtered geography and time range: name, CAS number, purpose, job count, average percentage of job, and maximum percentage of job.

Purpose categories make the table scannable: friction reducers, biocides, scale inhibitors, proppant and silica, carrier and water, and so on. Color-coded badges let you quickly scan the chemical landscape in a basin — whether operators are running biocide-heavy programs (suggesting specific microbiological concerns), how prevalent different friction reducer chemistries are, and what the typical proppant ratio looks like.

Searching by name or CAS number filters the table instantly. Clicking any ingredient opens a detail panel with two charts:

Top operators using this ingredient — shows which operators account for the most jobs disclosing this chemical, weighted by job count. This is useful for understanding whether a specific ingredient is ubiquitous across the basin or concentrated among a few operators with a particular completion philosophy.

Yearly usage trend — a line chart of how job count disclosing this ingredient has changed year over year. This is where adoption curves become visible. A new biocide chemistry that appeared in 3 jobs in 2019 and now appears in 400+ per year has a very different story than an ingredient that’s been declining since 2020. Trend data separates established industry practice from experimentation.

Every CAS number is hyperlinked to its PubChem entry, giving immediate access to the compound’s chemical properties, regulatory classifications, and toxicology data for anyone who needs that context.

Water Intensity

The Water Intensity tab aggregates water usage at the industry level for the selected state and county range.

Summary cards show:

Average water volume per job (Mbbl) and year-over-year change
Total job count in the dataset
The single operator with the highest average water per job

Below the cards, two charts: average water volume trend by year (showing whether the basin as a whole is moving toward larger or smaller jobs), and top operators by average water volume per job.

The YoY change card is worth watching in any basin where water sourcing and disposal costs are material. A 15% increase in average water per job across a basin over three years has infrastructure and cost implications that show up in frac job data before they show up in operator presentations.

What this data is useful for

Completion benchmarking: Before you benchmark on IP30 alone, understanding how different operators are completing wells gives context for the production differences. Higher water jobs, higher proppant concentrations, and specific chemical formulations all correlate (to varying degrees) with production outcomes.

Vendor and service company research: If you’re a chemical supplier, logistics company, or service provider, the Chemicals Explorer shows you where specific chemistries are being adopted, at what scale, and by which operators — without any customer disclosing proprietary information, because everything in FracFocus is public by law.

ESG and water management: Water intensity trends by basin are directly relevant to ESG analysis. Investors and operators tracking Scope 3 impacts or water stewardship commitments have a data source here that is legally disclosed and independently verifiable.

Technical due diligence: In an acquisition, the target operator’s chemical usage history is a window into their completion philosophy and any changes they’ve made over time. Are they experimenting? Standardizing? Following the herd or diverging from it?

FracFocus data is public. Most of the value in it has been sitting uncaptured because the raw format doesn’t support the analysis. The Chemicals Explorer is built to change that.

Chemicals Explorer is available on the Standard, Professional, and Enterprise plans. The 14-day trial includes full access — no credit card required.