Oil and gas (OG) production in Pennsylvania generates billions of liters of produced water yearly that has high levels of total dissolved solids, heavy metals, and naturally occurring radioactive material. When produced water is treated in centralized waste treatment facilities (CWTs) and discharged to surface water it can impact water quality and cause elevated activities of radium in sediments. In 2011, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection requested that wastewater treatment facilities no longer accept unconventional OG wastewater. Our study aimed to (1) assess if the policy change in April of 2011, which led to decreased unconventional OG wastewater treated at CWTs, also led to decreased radium activities in sediments and (2) characterize radium activities over a large transect (53km) both upstream and downstream of OG treatment facilities for evidence of watershed-scale impacts not observed in previous studies. We observed increased radium activity in sediments collected downstream of CWT facilities in both 2014 and 2016 and significantly (p &lt; 0.01) higher average radium activity for 30km downstream of a CWT. The sediments with higher total radium activity also contained higher percent silt and clay composition that may indicate transport of radium with fine-grained sediment material. In order to better understand the bioavailability of radium we conducted sequential leaching experiments on sediments to determine which mineral phases were associated with radium.

Determining the impacts of oil and gas wastewater discharge on sediments in Pennsylvania

254th National Meeting (2017)

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