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Experimental Analysis of the Environmental Behavior of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Compounds Prioritized by Potential of Environmental or Health Risk
Impact/Purpose:
As the practice of hydraulic fracturing rapidly expands, there is increasing concern about potential environmental impacts, including effects on ground water quality. Challenges to understanding potential impacts include limited data on the environmental behavior of fracturing fluid additives as well as insufficient analytical methods to detect evidence of transport. This research experimentally will derive the degradation kinetics and subsurface transport mechanisms of prioritized categories of organic contaminants, and subsequently build a predictive model of the environmental behavior of fracturing fluid organic additives introduced to shallow ground water drinking resources.
Description:
Given the large number of chemical additives used in hydraulic fracturing fluids, it is not practical to conduct a comprehensive analysis in cases where contamination is suspected. The fate and transport model can identify compounds with high likelihood for transport and persistence out of the hundreds possible, given the hydrogeologic conditions for a particular site. Additionally, the model may be applied to identify nonconservative organic compounds as tracers for evidence of fracturing fluid migration. The use of organic compounds as tracers could increase confidence in assessment of the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, particularly in cases where baseline water quality data are not available. This is due to the fact that many of these compounds would be unlikely to appear in water samples due to the natural background geochemistry or alternative anthropogenic sources.
Potential to Further Environmental/Human
Health Protection
Water and energy are two basic needs of society. There is a great amount
of potential to further develop natural gas as a domestic energy source;
however, the risk to human and environmental health is not fully
understood. Improved knowledge about the environmental behavior of
fracturing fluid compounds, as well as more reliable analytical methods
such as the use of organic tracers, may allow for better management by
environmental regulators regarding potential contamination of ground
water resources.