New Tracking Tool for Fracking Fluids
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Academic
Duke University Researchers Said They Have Identified a New Method to Trace Leaks and Spills of Fracking Fluids by Using a Novel Geochemical Fingerprinting Technology
In a study published Monday, the six scientists write that they are the first to describe the tracer method, which can pinpoint highly diluted remnants of the industrial fluids in waterways and other drinking water sources.
The study, appearing in Environmental Science and Technology, is entitled "New Tracers Identify Hydraulic Fracturing Fluids and Accidental Release from Oil and Gas Operations."
Its authors have been researching water contamination from shale gas drilling for several years. In the interim several have left Duke, including the paper's lead author, Nathaniel Warner, now a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth College's Department of Earth Sciences.
Warner said the methodology could be used as a forensic tool to identify illegal spills and accidental contamination.
The study tracks the presence of "flowback" water, also known as "produced" water, which is a mixture of water and chemicals used in fracking and the underground salines and metals that flush out of the ground when drillers strike gas.
The Duke researchers say this mixture can be identified by boron and lithium isotopes found in flowback water. They tested the theory on 39 samples in Pennsylvania and Arkansas, and at a spill site in West Virginia.
One of the test samples was flowback water that had been treated at a municipal water treatment plant. The fingerprints were detected in the treated water coming out of the facility's clean discharge pipe, Warner said.
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