Journal
JOURNAL OF CONTAMINANT HYDROLOGY
Volume 195, Issue -, Pages 23-30Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jconhyd.2016.10.005
Keywords
Hydraulic fracturing; Methane; Groundwater; Data mining
Funding
- National Science Foundation IIS Award [1639150]
- National Science Foundation RCN-SEES [OCE-11-40159]
- Penn State
- Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI)
- Div Of Information & Intelligent Systems
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr [1639150] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Since the 1800s, natural gas has been extracted from wells drilled into conventional reservoirs. Today, gas is also extracted from shale using high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF). These wells sometimes leak methane and must be re-sealed with cement. Some researchers argue that methane concentrations, C, increase in groundwater near shale-gas wells and that trackedwells leak more than conventional wells. We developed techniques to mine datasets of groundwater chemistry in Pennsylvania townships where contamination had been reported. Values of C measured in shallow private water wells were discovered to increase with proximity to faults and to conventional, but not shale-gas, wells in the entire area. However, in small subareas, C increased with proximity to some shale-gas wells. Data mining was used to map a few hotspots where C significantly correlates with distance to faults and gas wells. Near the hotspots, 3 out of 132 shale-gas wells (similar to 2%) and 4 out of 15 conventional wells (27%) intersect faults at depths where they are reported to be uncased or uncemented. These results demonstrate that even though these data techniques do not establish causation, they can elucidate the controls on natural methane emission along faults and may have implications for gas well construction. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available