“.…scientists at The University of Texas at Arlington, shows that many of the chemicals found in produced water ( i.e. fracking waste-water ) are carcinogens, solvents and petroleum distillates that can directly contaminate drinking water sources.…”
… “It could be that a molecule can be still very toxic even if present at very low concentration, or it has the potential to accumulate in the body over time, so the point is to know exactly what is in produced water….”
… “The team identified many chemicals, including a pesticide called atrazine; 1,4-dioxane, an organic compound that is irritating to the eyes and respiratory tract; toluene, which at low exposure has health effects like confusion, weakness, and loss of vision and hearing; and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which have been linked to skin, lung, bladder, liver and stomach cancers.“
After Encana/Ovintiv illegally frac’d my community’s drinking water aquifers, tests by the regulator found methane, ethane (thermogenic), benzene, toluene, hexavalent chromium, petroleum distillates and more in citizen and municipal drinking water supplies.
In my water, regulator post-frac tests found life threatening concentrations of methane and ethane, Encana’s baseline (pre-aquifer frac) test that I asked for showed no gas present, as do the historic records for my well on file with the regulator; chromium increased by a factor of 45; barium and strontium doubled; and tert-Butyl alcohol (TBA, a man made solvent used in the industry) and naphthalene were also found.
The regulator blamed nature and the frac harmed citizens and refused to make Encana disclose to the authorities and harmed families which chemicals the company injected. Even after ordered by the court to disclose to me all relevant records for document exchange in my lawsuit, Encana refuses to disclose the chemicals used. Too guilty?
Encana, now Ovintiv, lies on its website and to media, saying I refused to cooperate, refused testing of my water even though I asked Encana for baseline testing of my well which the company provided. After the incredibly damning results on my water, Encana thereafter refused to test for metals in other baseline water well tests in Alberta, not even when landowners asked for them, and offered to pay for them. Who is uncooperative?
A few chemicals on Encana/Ovintiv leases near Rosebud:
ERCB was EUB, became AER after Ernst lawsuit went public
This shows how Encana/Ovintiv “cares” about drinking water, health, families and communities the company fracs:
The study:
Optimization of thin film solid phase microextraction and data deconvolution methods for accurate characterization of organic compounds in produced water by Ronald V. Emmons, Tiffany Liden, Kevin A. Schug, and Emanuela Gionfriddo, 26 February 2020, Journal of Separation Science
Abstract
The continued rise in the extraction of unconventional oil and gas across the globe poses many questions about how to manage these relatively new waste‐streams. Produced water, the primary waste by‐product, contains a diverse number of anthropogenic additives together with the numerous hydrocarbons extracted from the well. Due to potential environmental hazards, it is critical to characterize the chemical composition of this type of waste before proper disposal or remediation/reuse. In this work, a thin film solid phase microextraction approach was developed and optimized to characterize produced water. The thin film device consisted of hydrophilic‐lipophilic balance particles embedded in polydimethylsiloxane and immobilized on a carbon mesh surface. These devices were chosen to provide broad extraction coverage and high reusability. Various parameters were evaluated to ensure reproducible results while minimizing analyte loss. This optimized protocol, consisting of a 15 min extraction followed by a short (3 s) rinsing step, enabled the reproducible analysis of produced water without any sample pretreatment. Extraction efficiency was suitable for both produced water additives and hydrocarbons. The developed approach was able to tentatively identify a total of 201 compounds from produced water samples, by using one‐dimensional gas chromatography hyphenated to mass spectrometry and data deconvolution.
…
The majority of compounds identified are long-chain hydrocarbons with varying levels of alkylation and length, followed by cyclic hydrocarbons and then potential additives and degradation products. Of these hydrocarbons are a number of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most abundant being phenanthrenes, anthracenes, and naphthalenes which have been previously described in other work [39]. A pesticide, atrazine, was also found in a single sample (PW 3), albeit at low levels which corroborates the idea that pesticides in PW are at ultra-trace levels and are rarely found in samples [13,40].
Many of these compounds, which given the abundance found in the samples analyzed, pose major environmental concerns due to their toxicity and persistence in the environment, most of which are supported by other works in the literature [14,39,40]. Most notably is the constituent 1,4-dioxane, a previously discovered PW component that is associated with human cancer [13,23] and has been shown to be challenging to remove from the waste-stream [23].
More polar compounds, such as diiodomethane or the various alcohols found throughout the samples are most likely additives added by the various oil production companies during the collection of oil. The extraction of these additives, being far more polar and less abundant than their hydrophobic counterparts, was enabled by the dual extraction mode provided by the HLB TF-SPME device.
Some compounds of particular interest, iodinated organics, were persistently detected in sample PW 3. Iodinated compounds have been detected in previous studies with the assumption that they are unreported additives [22]. As can be seen in Figure S4 (Supplementary Information), these compounds slowly degraded with a sharp molecular iodine peak forming during later analysis. This is most likely due to the well-known photosensitivity of iodinated compounds, the sample slowly becoming a darker shade of brown during the procedure. The formation of free iodide poses another environmental concern. It readily reacts with various chemical species to form potentially
toxic compounds. The formation of halogenated species in PW has been previously
demonstrated [22], and other transformation byproducts from additives have also been discovered [12]. More nonpolar additives identified, such as naphthalene derivatives, were found in a variety of samples. Other compounds, such as cholesterin acetate and 4-octen-3-one, may be microbial metabolites [15,17,41].
In total, across all three PW samples and the two different extraction modes, there
were a total of 201 compound hits that were validated, with numerous analytes being
exclusive to one extraction mode. …
Chemists identify toxic chemicals in fracking wastewater by University of Toledo, May 26, 2020, Phys.org
Before water produced during hydraulic fracturing is disposed of in waterways or reused in agriculture and other industries, chemists at The University of Toledo are zeroing in on water quality and environmental concerns of fracking wastewater to determine if it is safe for reuse.
The research scientists of the new Dr. Nina McClelland Laboratory for Water Chemistry and Environmental Analysis at UToledo created a new method that simultaneously identified 201 chemical compounds in fracking wastewater, called produced water.
The research, which is published in the Journal of Separation Science and was carried out in collaboration with scientists at The University of Texas at Arlington, shows that many of the chemicals found in produced water are carcinogens, solvents and petroleum distillates that can directly contaminate drinking water sources.
“The issue with produced water is that this is a very new and overlooked source of pollution, and disposal and purification practices are not yet fully optimized to guarantee total removal of environmental pollutants,” said Dr. Emanuela Gionfriddo, assistant professor of analytical chemistry in the UToledo Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Green Chemistry and Engineering. “Our work aimed to provide a new, simple and cost-effective method for the comprehensive characterization of chemicals and fill the gap of knowledge currently existing about the chemical composition of this waste product of the oil and natural gas industry.”
Scientists and natural gas companies are seeking creative ways to use produced water because current treatment processes to remove salts and radioactive substances—processes that include reverse osmosis and distillation—are expensive.
“Current methods for chemical characterization of produced water can give an estimate of the total amount of contamination but do not give information about what type of contamination is present,” Gionfriddo said.
“It could be that a molecule can be still very toxic even if present at very low concentration, or it has the potential to accumulate in the body over time, so the point is to know exactly what is in produced water, not only how much.”
Gionfriddo’s research outlines how the chemists developed and optimized a thin-film, solid-phase microextraction approach to characterize the organic compounds in the produced water.
The team identified many chemicals, including a pesticide called atrazine; 1,4-dioxane, an organic compound that is irritating to the eyes and respiratory tract; toluene, which at low exposure has health effects like confusion, weakness, and loss of vision and hearing; and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which have been linked to skin, lung, bladder, liver and stomach cancers.
“There are many chemicals that still need to be identified at this time,” said Ronald Emmons, UToledo Ph.D. candidate.
“More research also is needed to test the uptake of these chemicals in crops when produced water is recycled for agriculture. We need to study if and how these chemicals from the produced water can accumulate in the soil watered with produced water and if these chemicals can transfer from the soil to the crops.”
The collaborative research between UToledo and UT Arlington will continue using the new method for screening the presence of toxic molecules in produced water samples from various sampling sites in Texas.
UToledo scientists also are developing new methods for the extraction of heavy metals and rare earth elements that will aid the full characterization of produced water samples.
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