European Study on Chemical Composition of Fracking Wastewater: Can it be drinkable?

Have you heard of “halogenated hydrocarbons”? It is a group of chemicals containing elements that when consumed by humans, it can damage the nervous system and your liver. Normally, these compounds are not on your daily menu.  But studies suggest these elements are appearing in water as by the reuse of fracking wastewater which ironically has been treated with chlorine-containing antibacterial chemicals.  The process of cleaning the water is a common practice. More studies of treated wastewater are being conducted to more clearly determined if the creation of halogenated hydrocarbons from antibacterial chemicals occurs during treatment of wastewater or during reuse.

Produced water, water that is chemically cleaned, can contain a complex mixture of metals — salts and other chemicals, partly composed of the original fracturing fluid components — plus chemicals released by the rocks in the area. Large volumes of water used for fracking poses some level of side effects of the wastewater on human and environmental health. To investigate further, researchers in Europe, in one of the most comprehensive studies of chemical composition of its kind to date, took samples of produced water from three fracking sites in the US.  A number of different analysis techniques were used to determine the chemical composition of the samples, although not the concentrations of the different organic (carbon-based) constituents.

The researchers found that produced water contained a diverse array of chemicals including toxic metals such as mercury and the carcinogens toluene and ethylbenzene. However, a group of harmful chemicals, ‘polyaromatic hydrocarbons’ commonly found in mining and coal extraction wastewater, were absent.

A wide range of metals were found in all samples, but varied depending on the geology of the area. Among these were chromium, mercury and arsenic, all of which were found at levels exceeding US maximum contamination levels (MCL) for drinking water in at least one well. Over 50 different organic chemicals were identified, the majority of which were part of a group of chemicals called ‘saturated hydrocarbons’. Many of these were common to more than one well. They included carcinogens toluene and ethylbenzene. However, the researchers did not find polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which are usually found in mining and coal extraction wastewater.

The authors believe that detailed chemical analyses of produced waters, such as theirs, highlight problems in wastewater treatment protocols,  In particular, the problem of developing a process that removes a wide range of organic compounds. While the findings of this research are based on fracking sites in the US, they may also be useful for other regions where fracking is being actively pursued, such as the UK, and could help to develop policies and techniques to reduce the risk of environmental contamination.

Fresh water continues to be challenged, not from just drought or salt contamination, but from the process of re-creating quality drinking water.

San Jose Water Company: Water quality and environmental compliance are critical business functions

Our new customer, San Jose Water Company, is deploying our Locus EIM and Locus Mobile solutions to consolidate and manage its water sampling and environmental compliance data. The keyword  for SJWC is “consolidate”. San Jose Water’s challenge was to consolidate its 12+ data silos into one comprehensive solution with the capabilities to provide a tighter, more integrated system.

SJWC determined that Locus EIM and Locus Mobile provided the right solution. Francois Rodigari, the director of Water Quality and Environmental Services at San Jose Water said it best: “Water quality and environmental compliance are critical business functions at San Jose Water Company.  …for the first time, the ability to consolidate and access critical information on data related to water quality and environmental compliance in a single repository based on a cloud platform. This comprehensive view of our water system will help us to comprehensively manage all data related to drinking water and environmental compliance, and as a result, bring higher efficiency to our organization.”

Thank you SJWC!

San Jose Water Company selects Locus Technologies for its water quality and environmental management system software

The Locus EIM SaaS will streamline SJWC’s entire water compliance continuum from watershed to water treatment to water quality at its consumer’s tap

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 24 February 2015 — Locus Technologies, a leader in environmental and compliance enterprise management software, today announced that San Jose Water Company (SJWC), an investor-owned utility providing water service to a population of approximately one million people in the Santa Clara Valley, has selected Locus as its environmental information management system. SJWC is deploying the Locus EIM SaaS-based software to consolidate and manage its field data collection; water compliance and water quality data; and all its environmental compliance and environmental data. SJWC will also use the Locus EIM to manage its environmental permits for all its sites and facilities.

“Water quality and environmental compliance are critical business functions at San Jose Water Company,” said Francois Rodigari, Director of Water Quality and Environmental Services. “Locus and its EIM software are giving us, for the first time, the ability to consolidate and access critical information on data related to water quality and environmental compliance in a single repository based on a cloud platform. This comprehensive view of our water system will help us to comprehensively manage all data related to drinking water and environmental compliance, and as a result, bring higher efficiency to our organization.”

Locus EIM is a comprehensive and configurable software designed to manage mission-critical environmental and sustainability data to help organization organize, manage, report, and visualize sampling, analytical, and subsurface data for compliance and assurance reporting for a variety of vertical markets including water, gas and oil, power generating utilities, and food and beverage.

“Our mission is to help organization, such as San Jose Water Company, to achieve their environmental stewardship goals by providing them the software tools to control the management of all data points of their water quality and compliance management,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “Our EIM water quality management cloud-based software for surface water, drinking water, groundwater, and wastewater provides our customers with a highly scalable and a feature rich application that gives water utilities strong analytical power, streamlined field sampling capabilities, mobile collection, and analysis as well as compliance management. We are pleased San Jose Water Company will be utilizing EIM to ensure that their customers are provided with the highest water quality possible.”

 

ABOUT SAN JOSE WATER
San Jose Water Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of SJW Corp. and founded in 1866, is an investor-owned water company headquartered in Silicon Valley and is one of the largest and most technically sophisticated urban water system in the United States. SJWC serves over 1 million people in the San Jose metropolitan area comprising about 138 square miles. The utility ensures its buyers with high quality, life sustaining water, with an emphasis on exceptional customer service.

Quality Water — A new look at the tap

As an environmental software and services company, we work closely with companies that need to follow Federal, State and Local compliance mandates to ensure the status quo of the environment.  One market segment that always amazes me is drinking water. Every single day, public water systems test your tap water.

Everyday single day, water is collected, tested, analyzed and reported to internal public water teams, and less frequently, external agencies.   Today we announced that San Jose Water Company, that serves more than one million people in the Silicon Valley region, has selected Locus for our environmental software and mobile app solution, EIM and Locus Mobile.  The deployed systems consolidates and manages San Jose Water’s field data collection; water compliance and water quality data; and all its environmental compliance and environmental data.  SJWC will also use the Locus EIM to manage its environmental permits for all its sites and facilities.

Want to learn more about water?  Check out these resources:

​View the 6-minute TedTalk “It’s time to put water first” by Heather Himmelberger from the University of New Mexico, Director of the Southwest Environmental Finance Center at the University of New Mexico.

For more information, please visit www.drinktap.org.

 

California to Regulate Groundwater in 2015

California’s drought prompted the Legislature into action in 2014, leading lawmakers to regulate groundwater for the first time. The state will begin the long process of regulating groundwater for the first time in the state’s history under three new laws that require local agencies to create sustainable groundwater management plans to ensure priority basins are sustainable by 2040.

Since the state’s founding, water has been considered a property right; landowners have been able to pump as much water from the ground as they want. But increasing reliance on underground water, particularly during droughts, has led to more pumping from some basins than what is naturally being replaced.

On 16 September 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown signed three companion bills, The three bills: SB 1168, AB 1739 and SB 1319, which compose the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (the Act) create the first comprehensive framework for regulating groundwater in California, placing managerial and monitoring responsibilities in the hands of local agencies while also creating mechanisms under which state agencies may oversee and potentially even intervene in groundwater management. With the Act to go into effect on 1 January 2015, and numerous implementation deadlines, stakeholders throughout the state should prepare for increased regulation, management, and oversight.

The Act requires the establishment of groundwater sustainability agencies (GSA) for groundwater basins in the state. By 31 January 2015, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) will classify each groundwater basin (as identified by DWR Bulletin 118) as high, medium, low or very low priority. GSAs responsible for high- and medium-priority groundwater basins must create and implement a groundwater sustainability plan (GSP) for their basins. Groundwater basins, or portions of groundwater basins, which are subject to a previous groundwater adjudication are exempt from the GSP requirement.

Once formed, GSAs will have broad groundwater management and investigatory powers to prepare and execute the GSP. GSAs may inspect property or facilities to ensure the requirements of the GSP are being met, including use of surface waters. Further, the GSA will have the authority to regulate and limit groundwater extractions, require the submission of annual extraction reports or impose well spacing requirements, among other substantial powers.

The Act requires that GSPs be designed to achieve “sustainable groundwater management” for the basin within 20 years of implementation. “Sustainable groundwater management” is defined as the maintenance of groundwater use in a manner that does not cause “undesirable results.” An undesirable result is the occurrence of at least one of the following:

  • Chronic lowering of groundwater levels, indicating a significant and unreasonable depletion of supply.
  • Significant and unreasonable reduction of groundwater storage.
  • Significant and unreasonable seawater intrusion.
  • Significant and unreasonable degradation in water quality.
  • Significant and unreasonable land subsidence that substantially interferes with surface land uses.
  • Surface water depletions that have significant and unreasonable adverse impacts on beneficial uses of the surface water.

About $10 billion = The 2014 Corporate EHS Non-compliance and Fines Cost

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its annual enforcement and compliance results revealing both the cleanup improvements as well as compliance fines industries have made in 2014. In this report, the agency focused on large, high impact enforcement cases. Environmental Cleanup Improvements:

  • Reductions of an estimated 141 million pounds of air pollutants, including 6.7 million pounds of air toxics.
  • Reductions of approximately 337 million pounds of water pollutants.
  • Clean up of an estimated 856 million cubic yards of contaminated water/aquifers.

Investment and Fines
Enforcement guidelines this year required companies to invest more than $9.7 billion in actions and equipment to control pollution as well as clean up contaminated sites. EPA’s non-compliant cases resulted in $163 million in combined federal administrative, civil judicial penalties, and criminal fines. EPA holds criminal violators accountable that threaten the health and safety of American residents.

“Despite challenges posed by budget cuts and a government shutdown, we secured major settlements in key industry sectors and brought criminal violators to justice. This work resulted in critical investments in advanced technologies and innovative approaches to reduce pollution and improve compliance,” said Cynthia Giles, Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.
Companies can reduce their non-compliance risks and lower their monitoring and reporting costs by implementing enterprise EHS and Sustainability software to automate information management, compliance, and monitoring for exceedances for a fraction of what potential fines could cost them. Once a non-compliance fine is imposed the cost of brand damage could be even worse and incalculable.

California’s Water Shortage

A new paper published in Nature Climate Change, by NASA water scientist James Famiglietti, presents the chilling reality of California’s ongoing drought crisis. “The Global Groundwater Crisis,” uses satellite data to measure the depletion of the world’s aquifers, and summarizes the effects this has on the environment.

These aquifers contain groundwater that more than 2 billion individuals rely on as their primary source of water. Groundwater is also essential, as it is one of the main sources we rely on to irrigate food crops. In times of drought, the lack of rain and snow results in less surface water (the water that settles in lakes, streams, and rivers). Thus, farmers must rely on available groundwater to irrigate their crops, leading to rapid depletion in areas of high farming concentration.

California’s Central Valley has been one of the most effected regions in the state. The map below depicts groundwater withdrawals in California during the first three years of the state’s ongoing drought.

According to James Famiglietti, “California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins have lost roughly 15 cubic kilometers of total water per year since 2011.”  That means “more water than all 38 million Californians use for domestic and municipal supplies annually—over half of which is due to groundwater pumping in the Central Valley.”

As more water is pumped from the aquifers, things can only get worse. As this trend continues, wells will have to be dug deeper, resulting in increased pumping costs. This, in turn, will lead to a higher salt contents, which inhibits crop yields and can eventually cause soil to lose productivity altogether. Over time, Famiglietti writes, “inequity issues arise because only the relatively wealthy can bear the expense of digging deeper wells, paying greater energy costs to pump groundwater from increased depths and treating the lower-quality water that is often found deeper within aquifers.” This problem is already apparent in California’s Central Valley.  Some low-income residents are forced to let their wells go dry, while many other farmers are forced to irrigate with salty water pumped from deep in the aquifer.

The lesson we can learn from Famiglietti’s research is that “Groundwater is being pumped at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished, so that many of the largest aquifers on most continents are being mined, their precious contents never to be returned.”  This problem of diminishing groundwater is perpetuated, due the lack of forethought, regulation, or research concerning this water source. Famiglietti contends that if current trends hold, “groundwater supplies in some major aquifers will be depleted in a matter of decades.”

Without any change of practices, we can expect steeper droughts and more demand for water. Famiglietti suggests that if we ever plan on getting the situation under control, we must start carefully measuring groundwater and treat it like the precious resource that it is. However, if the globe continues on this path without any adjustment, it will most likely result in civil uprising and international violent conflict in the water-stressed regions of the world.

Locus Technologies Introduces Locus Mobile for Data Access and Input On the Go

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) leverages new mobile app for its environmental data collection processes

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 27 October 2014 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in cloud-based environmental compliance and information management software, has announced the launch of a new mobile application Locus Mobile, designed for easy and accurate data collection on the go.

Locus Mobile works both online and offline to ensure continuous access and interaction, and takes advantage of the most advanced technology to provide a variety of options for ad hoc sampling, additional field data checks, dynamic forms, and effective mapping tools. Locus Mobile users can easily configure business-specific data collection needs, enter data offline and upload on-demand, and synchronize data back to Locus’ systems for final review, storing, managing, and reporting.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has awarded a contract to Locus for the new Locus Mobile app, through which users can upload data directly from the field to their data management and compliance system, EIM. By taking advantage of configurable planned sampling and monitoring events, real-time data validation in the field, GPS mapping capabilities, and a complete audit trail of who, what, when and where, LANL expects that it will operate with a significantly higher degree of confidence that its environmental reporting and decision making are based off of the most accurate information possible in real time.

“We are seeing growing customer interest in adding mobility to our full-line of environmental and sustainability information management applications to more efficiently centralize remotely collected information for executive decision-support reporting. The next step is to push information the other way so that remote personnel are empowered with the information and instructions they need to take appropriate preventative and remedial action on the ground, perform real-time data validation, and spot exceedances,” said Locus CEO, Neno Duplan. “As a result of this more frictionless two-way data flow, mobile has the potential to completely transform the way enterprises address their environmental and sustainability challenges and achieve positive outcomes for the environment, brand protection, and their shareholders and customers.”

Locus Mobile is offered as a downloadable app from the Apple App Store to work with Locus’ cloud software systems.

Water Scarcity Shines Spotlight on the Fracking Industry

The World Resources Institute (WRI) has released a report that highlights the potential for water scarcity to put a halt on fracking among the world’s top 20 shale countries.

In one of these countries—the United States—fracking has been used for years. However, new technology has enabled companies to drill deeper and horizontally, allowing fracking in more populated areas than ever before. These modern fracking techniques require millions more gallons per well of water, resulting in millions more gallons of contaminated wastewater. This increased amount of water usage results in two major causes for concern: water scarcity, and groundwater contamination.

Adding to this concern, the WRI report states that 38 percent of the world’s shale resources are found in areas that are water barren or “under high to extremely high levels of water stress”, and 40 percent of countries with the largest shale reserves have severely limited freshwater sources. With the spotlight being shined brighter than ever on fracking’s relationship with water, the WRI has compiled a list of actions for these operations to take in order to help preserve the integrity of water supplies. The list is made up of four recommendations.

First, the WRI suggests conducting water risk assessments to understand local water availability and reduce business risk. Next, increase transparency and engage with local regulators, communities, and industry to minimize uncertainty and ensure adequate water governance to guarantee the security of the water and reduce risks. The last action the WRI recommends is minimizing freshwater use and engaging in corporate water stewardship to reduce impacts on water availability.

Current findings and water shortages suggest an urgent need for improved monitoring and transparency for operations within the fracking industry. Using a centralized system for managing crucial fracking information can increase transparency, improve compliance with current regulations, and better protect the quality and quantity of the world’s water supplies.

Droughts Reinforce California’s Need for Water Management Improvements

California, also known as the Golden State, has many well-known qualities that attribute to its reputation. Many times, these qualities refer to accomplishments or physical attributes that serve as superlatives the state can claim as its own. Some examples include having the ninth largest economy in the world, and containing the highest and lowest points in the continental U.S.

Another title that California can claim is the state with the most variable climate in the U.S. – a title that also comes with some consequences.

Possibly the most significant consequence is California’s need to become resourceful with its water supply- not entirely surprising, given the drought it’s been experiencing all summer. Droughts, which unfortunately occur on a fairly frequent basis, cause the state to rely heavily on groundwater. Estimates conclude that California may rely on this source for up to 65% of its water needs.

However, California is the only state that doesn’t regulate groundwater, meaning that many of these groundwater sources are over-pumped, which can cause serious, permanent damages such as subsidence (the ground sinking), and destroyed aquifers.

What many environmental experts believe California may need is an increase on both federal and state-level regulation when it comes to water. Some suggest they should look to Australia as a model, who after their own devastating drought strongly reinforced that water is a public good, and publicly owned, in their new laws on water rights. This aggressive move toward statewide water efficiency standards is seen as a great first step, and pairs well with the need for groundwater pumping regulation, a diversified water portfolio, focus on community-based water storage, and upgraded water infrastructure, among others.

If California were to answer the call for stricter regulation on water use, it would also need a way to manage monitoring practices in order to successfully abide by these new regulations. Water quality management software is available and could potentially be a piece to the puzzle of solving the state’s water crisis.

The first bill to regulate groundwater is currently making its way through the law-making process, and only time will tell if this new water policy will set the stage for better water management techniques.