This post is part of a series on EPA’s Hydraulic Fracturing Study. Previous posts will give you more detail on the specific case studies EPA is conducting and you may want to read them prior to reading this post.

EPA is running a number of standard water quality tests as part of their water well sampling for their case studies. These tests characterize the water. Standard measures for water are things like temperature, pH, Total Dissolved Solids (you’ll see this referred to as TDS), specific conductivity, alkalinity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, oxidation/reduction potential, ferrous iron, and hydrogen sulfide.  EPA will also be looking at existing water quality data collected for the case study areas by government agencies whose business is to characterize water resources. Your average person only generally knows they have hard water, or too much lime that leaves a ring in their bathtub, or their water smells like rotten eggs. They don’t know if they have a bicarbonate or alkaline water, or low dissolved oxygen, or hydrogen sulfide. But your water scientist will. These are water characteristics that they use to describe water. Get one of these water scientists at a dinner party and they will be telling you how your favorite European mineral water gets its taste. EPA’s water scientists will look for changes in water quality characteristics or unusual test data and deduce if something may be going on in the well they are testing.

EPA is testing a large number of chemicals that hopefully aren’t characteristic of your average drinking water. These are mostly chemicals associated with the components of hydrofracturing fluid. Hydrofracturing fluid is generally over 98 percent water but the remaining 2 percent is composed of additives that help the engineer get the oil and gas out of the rock and into the oil and gas well. The additives EPA is testing for are chemicals such as glycols, acids, surfactants, volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds. Volatile organics are things like toluene and styrene. Semi-volatile organics are things like 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene. These are not good to drink.

There are also natural substances commonly found in the flowback water that are removed from the rock during the fracturing process. Some of these are being tested for as well. These are arsenic, manganese and iron. And EPA is testing for chloride and bromide which are characteristic of the flowback water as well. If you have been reading this series of posts on hydrofracturing you will remember that EPA has concerns about adequate treatment of chloride and bromide from flowback water at Publically Owned Treatment Works. Natural organic material is also being tested. And EPA is testing for methane, ethane, and propane which are all components of natural gas.

Finally EPA is testing for: stable isotopes of the components of water, which we know are hydrogen and oxygen; stable isotopes of hydrogen and carbon, which you may not know are the components of methane; and strontium. The easiest explanation of why EPA is analyzing for them is because stable isotopes have different ratios depending on how they were produced and where they came from.

This is kind of an aside, but did you know certain companies who require their products to contain a specific proprietary ingredient that only they make often check stable isotopic ratios of their product manufactured by contractor entities? Why? To see if the contractors are using the proprietary ingredients! They can tell by the stable isotopic ratio.

In EPA’s case they are looking at what the usual stable isotopic ratios are for water, methane and strontium in the case study area. If EPA’s well samples in the case study area then show differences from what the normal isotopic ratios are, it is an indication something might have been introduced. In other words it is an indicator of contamination.

Oh wait I forgot, EPA is also testing for NORM. Remember that from an earlier post? It is the naturally occurring radioactive material.

All in all this is a lot of testing and it will be done at several EPA laboratories.  EPA should have a very good picture of whether water in people’s wells has been contaminated and it should help them draw some conclusions on potential sources of the contamination.