Duke: Fracking has not contaminated groundwater in northwestern West
Virginia, but accidental spills of fracking wastewater may pose a threat
to surface water in the region, according to a new study led by
scientists at Duke University. “Based on consistent evidence from comprehensive testing, we found no
indication of groundwater contamination over the three-year course of
our study,” said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water
quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. ”However, we did
find that spill water associated with fracked wells and their wastewater
has an impact on the quality of streams in areas of intense shale gas
development.”
“The bottom-line assessment,” he said, “is that groundwater is so far
not being impacted, but surface water is more readily contaminated
because of the frequency of spills.”
The peer-reviewed study was published this month in the European journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.
The Duke team collaborated with researchers from The Ohio State
University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University and the
French Geological Survey to sample water from 112 drinking wells in
northwestern West Virginia over a three-year period.
Twenty of the water wells were sampled before drilling or fracking
began in the region, to provide a baseline for later comparisons.
Samples were tested for an extensive list of contaminants, including
salts, trace metals and hydrocarbons such as methane, propane and
ethane. Each sample was systematically analyzed using a broad suite of
geochemical and isotopic forensic tracers that allowed the researchers
to determine if contaminants and salts in the water stemmed from nearby
shale gas operations, from other human sources, or were naturally
occurring.
The tests showed that methane and saline groundwater were present in
both the pre-drilling and post-drilling well water samples, but that
they had a chemistry that was subtly but distinctly different from the
isotopic fingerprints of methane and salts contained in fracking fluids
and shale gas. This indicated that they occurred naturally in the
region’s shallow aquifers and were not the result of the recent shale
gas operations.
“The integrated suite of tracers we used -- which were developed at
Duke in recent years -- provides us with tools sensitive enough to
accurately distinguish these subtle differences, which might be missed
if you only used a handful of simple measurement techniques,” explained
Jennifer Harkness, a recent PhD graduate of Duke’s Nicholas School, who
led the new study.
Some of the tracers have never been used together before, Vengosh noted.
“To our knowledge, we are the first to report a broadly integrated use
of these various geochemical techniques in studying groundwater
contamination before and after the installation and fracking of shale
gas wells.”
“What we found in the new study in West Virginia is different from
what we have found in previous studies in northeastern Pennsylvania and
Texas but similar to what we found in Arkansas,” Vengosh said. “That’s
because geology varies by region, as do the drilling operators and
conditions. Time also plays a factor. What we found in the study area in
West Virginia after three years may be different from what we see after
10 years, because the impact on groundwater isn’t necessarily
immediate.”
“Using this integrated toolbox, we can conduct similar tests in as
many other regions as possible, over longer time frames, to determine
both the unique short-term local impacts on water quality, and the
broad, cumulative long-term impacts,” he said.
Vengosh and Harkness conducted the study with Thomas Darrah, Colin
Whyte and Myles Moore of Ohio State; Nathaniel Warner of Penn State;
Romain Millot and Wolfram Kloppman of the French Geological Survey, and
Robert Jackson of Stanford.
Funding came from the National Science Foundation (grants #EAR-1441497 and #1249255) and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
CITATION:
”The Geochemistry of Naturally Occurring Methane and Saline Groundwater
in an Area of Unconventional Shale Gas Development,: Jennifer S.
Harkness, Thomas H. Darrah, Nathaniel R. Warner, Colin J. Whyte, Myles
T. Moore, Romain Millot, Woldfram Kloppman, Robert B. Jackson, and Avner
Vengosh; Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, July, 2017 (available online,
April 2017): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2017.03.039