Tucked in the corner on the second floor of Weld County’s public health building, Mark Thomas spends his days in a lab coat looking for a “black grain of sand on a white beach,” he says. With the help of a fancy chemistry machine called the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer, Thomas, a chemist for Weld County, is looking for signs of oil and natural gas in samples collected from well water. The $145,000 machine spans an entire counter top and looks a lot like an elongated printer. It sifts through each water sample in search of 59 different contaminants in measurements as little as 10 parts per billion. (Imagine looking for 10 black sugar cubes in 1,000 office buildings filled with white sugar cubes, Thomas said. That is 10 parts per billion). The instrument is part of a free well water testing program that Weld County officials rolled out in September to give residents peace of mind in the midst of growing oil and gas activity, they said.
On Wednesday, Thomas ran the county’s 100th water sample through the gas chromatograph. The sample hailed from a home west of Fort Lupton, where property owner Sherry Been said she was concerned that hydraulic fracturing had worsened the high levels of benzene, a component often found in petroleum, beneath her home. If the sample taken on Been’s property produces any sign of groundwater contamination from oil and gas activity in Weld County, it will be the first, Thomas said. At the state level, officials with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission say hundreds of test samples and a rigorous analysis of 3,000 wells in southwest Colorado similarly show no correlation between fracking and water contamination.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique used by the oil and gas industry that blasts water, sand and chemicals into rock formations about 7,000 feet below the earth’s surface to extract oil and natural gas.
For many people, especially in nearby Longmont and Fort Collins, where fracking was banned by voters and the city council, respectively, the idea of fracking remains threatening.
Been of Fort Lupton said her cats, which drink her property’s well water, are losing their hair, and her dog is always sick. She said she got her well water tested about a year and a half ago and found high levels of benzene, so she wanted to take advantage of the county’s program to see whether those levels had changed with more drilling in the area.
Industry officials, including Thom Kerr, permitting manager for the COGCC, say the likelihood of that happening is very low. Benzene is a component of oil, meaning it lies in the same area where oil and gas companies are drilling, about a mile below Been’s waterbed. It would take an extreme force to provide a means for benzene to reach that far, he said. The more likely way that anything would reach Been’s water would be from leaking out of the wellbore, or the actual hole that oil and gas companies drill in the ground. According to the COGCC, operators are required to line the wellbore with several layers of steel and cement casing as far as 50 feet below the base of the deepest aquifer to prevent leaks. Oil and gas operators must also install a layer of production casing after drilling, conduct a pressure test and have the COGCC review the construction design of the well. Those requirements are meant to protect public health and environment in the same way that many other industries are regulated, Kerr said. For example, the wrong mix of chemicals to create steel could be extremely dangerous — and its improper disposal could be even worse.
“I think that when we start singling out fracking, we think it’s kind of a unique thing, but we have all kinds of industrial processes that, if we were exposed to them or we ate them, they would all kill us,” he said.
VOCs, BTEX and the EPA: What Weld is testing for
Out of the 100 samples that Weld County has collected, four have shown extremely low concentrations of the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which could be indicative of oil or natural gas, Thomas said.
VOCs are gases emitted from a variety of sources, including paint, pesticides and cleaning supplies, that could have adverse health effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. When scientists are looking for oil and gas activity, they nearly always look for BTEX — benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, which are VOCs that often come from petroleum. At a reporting limit of 0.5 parts per billion for VOCs — that’s a half of a black sugar cube in 1,000 office buildings full of white sugar cubes — it’s impossible to attribute the presence of VOCs in those four samples to any one activity, including oil and gas, Thomas said. What is more, the EPA regulates the presence of BTEX in drinking water at much higher levels. According to the EPA’s list of drinking water contaminants, up to 10,000 parts per billion of xylenes can be present in water before it would be a health risk to consume. Of the BTEX compounds, the EPA most stringently limits benzene, at a maximum of 5 parts per billion in drinking water. That’s still a tenfold increase over the amount that Weld County’s testing program reports.
Trevor Jiricek, Weld County’s director of public health and environment, said it is important to remember a slew of factors could contribute to the presence of certain chemicals.
“We are providing this data without knowing what has gone on with that property for the past 100 years,” Jiricek said. Thomas said a plot of property where a number of diesel farm trucks have been stored and driven, for example, could show up in water samples with higher VOCs.
The gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer is so sensitive, in fact, that it picked up the plastics when new carpet was installed in the county’s public health building, and some chemicals were exaggerated when the parking lot outside of the building was repaved.
On the road to Fort Lupton, Weld County lab technician Denise Carter said the highly sensitive nature of the water test is why she brings with her three vials of water — one “blank” water sample from the lab to reflect anything that might have altered results on site, plus two samples of water from the house bathroom. “We want the truest sample of what the water is,” Carter said as she donned bright green rubber gloves. Carter said most of the water samples she collects are in south Weld County, probably because residents are closer to oil and gas activity there.
Those who live in municipalities are sometimes confused when they can’t get their water tested, Carter said. That’s because the testing is open only to residents who are on well water. It’s important to provide the service, though — to pay for a private party to do this kind of test, residents could pay up to $300, Carter said. Most urban dwellers in Weld County get their water from a city or a water district that treats and tests it for the things that the county’s instrument detects. That water typically comes from melted mountain snowpack, or surface water, meaning there is no direct threat to those sources where fracking activities are concerned.
Contamination
It can be a concern, however, where oil and gas surface spills are involved, environmentalists say. Bruce Baizel, director of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, said he is more concerned about spills, such as the 84,000 gallons of fracking flowback water in February that leaked out of a PDC Energy oil well near Windsor, than fracking. Baizel said the number of spills in Colorado and especially Weld County has increased at an alarming rate, and the reporting process for spills is not transparent enough because it is difficult to distinguish in state data how they happened. “It’s the fact that we are still getting each year more contamination issues,” Baizel said, fracking related or not.
Chris Arend, spokesman for Conservation Colorado, echoed Baizel’s comments, saying many environmentalists would also prefer a more comprehensive water testing requirement.
In January, the COGCC passed a new set of rules, touting the most stringent water testing rules in the nation. In Weld County’s greater Wattenberg area, operators are now required to test one water well every quarter square mile before and after they drill.
The issue of water contamination from fracking surfaced in the national spotlight with the documentary “Gasland” in 2010, which included several properties in Weld County with high concentrations of methane in their water. The COGCC found a number of inaccuracies and issued a response to the movie, pointing out that methane comes from two sources — bacteria or rocks (scientists distinguish it as biogenic or thermeogenic methane ). To link oil and gas activity to water contamination, the methane would have to come from the rocks where drilling occurs. In “Gasland,” the methane was biogenic, meaning it came from the breakdown of organic material that was naturally present in that area’s aquifers.
When Weld County detects a higher level of any chemical in a sample, it can often be traced back to organic materials, just like in the case of methane, Thomas said.
Focus on formulas
Still, some residents most fear the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing formulas — substances that neither the county nor the state technically test for. On FracFocus.org, the national database where oil and gas companies disclose the chemicals they use in their fracking formulas (it’s mandatory in Colorado), there are 59 different purposes for the dozens of chemicals most commonly used in fracking. Industry officials and environmentalist alike say the mandatory disclosure on FracFocus.org was a milestone in transparency. To the common reader, the chemicals listed on the site, such as triethanolamine zirconate, lauryl sulfate or guar gum, look a lot like gobbledygook. The details listed alongside each chemical describe their purpose. Methanol, for example, is listed as a corrosion inhibitor, friction reducer, gelling agent and surfactant — more jargon to the common reader, and for some, a reason to fear what is in those formulas.
Karen Spray, environmental protection specialist for the COGCC, said it doesn’t make sense to test for fracking chemicals. “There is enough variety in what is used out there (in fracking operations), that it would be enormously expensive and time prohibitive to test for everything all the time,” she said. More than that, the testing would not yield any new information, Spray said. She said there are a number of indicators in the state’s regular water testing that would point to the possible presence of frackingrelated chemicals. For example, if scientists found chloride in a water sample, it may be potassium chloride, a fluid often used in fracking formulas. In the testing the state does now, scientists would detect the chloride, and that would be a red flag, Spray said.
Baizel, with the Accountability Project, said from the environmentalist’s side, it’s difficult to even say if frack chemicals are a concern because the disclosure and testing is “kind of a big unknown,” he said.
Todd Hartman, spokesman for the COGCC, said the chemical disclosure rule was less about dictating what companies use and more about improving transparency and communication with the public. The groundwater testing rules, as well as recent setback rules, were also in response to public concern, he said.

Kerr said the COGCC does what it can to assuage public fears regarding groundwater and drilling. They hold a number of public meetings and town hall forums, and are continuously working to post as much information as possible to their website. But Kerr said media attention is usually focused on the negative stories.
Despite the efforts from the COGCC to quell the public’s fears about fracking, Baizel said those fears remain. It is frustrating, he added, to hear government and industry officials downplay their concerns, even though much of the evidence is based on scientific data such as that collected in Weld County’s water testing program. “When you feel like your water might be at risk, or your kids’ health is at risk, those are upsetting things,” he said. “To be told that it’s not a big deal, that does get people upset … The frack issue has really changed the tone of the discussion.”
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