On the slick website of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, a lobbying organization for the local drilling industry, an anonymous man asks a question on behalf of his worried wife. "My wife is concerned about potential contamination of our 800-foot-deep well. Who will oversee the safe drilling of the well which assures no spilling effects to the water at that level?" he asks. The industry responds underneath with an assurance that all drilling activity, including water-related issues, is regulated by the Texas Railroad Commission, which is doing a great job.

But out in the real world, scientists at UT-Arlington have published a study suggesting that just maybe his worried wife isn't so dumb after all. In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal, a research team lead by Dr. Zacariah Hildebrand documents their findings on local drinking water. His team analyzed 550 groundwater samples collected from aquifers over the Barnett Shale, the formation in North Texas that has been profitable to local drillers but slowly pissing off our nearby suburbs. The results make a strong case for a home water filter, one of the expensive ones:



We detected elevated levels of 10 different metals and the presence of 19 different chemical compounds, including benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene. These results constitute the largest analysis of groundwater quality in aquifers overlying a shale formation associated with UOG [unconventional oil and gas] activities.





None of those chemicals is good for us, though we're already exposed to them from a variety of sources. Benzene in particular is a known carcinogen that environmental groups and scientists have warned for years was used by the gas industry in the fracking process. (The chemicals aren't banned for use in drilling because of the so-called "Halliburton Loophole," a law passed by Congress in 2005 that exempts hydraulic fracturing from the Clean Water Act).