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Measuring Baseline Groundwater Quality in Eastern Boulder County Before New Oil and Gas Development

For four days a week through the end of 2018, Holly Miller, Mark Schroeder, Talia Assi, John Stults, Greg Lackey, Danny Birdell, and Talia Assi will be driving around eastern Boulder County to get well water samples from residents who volunteered to provide access to their domestic and irrigation wells.  Holly, Mark, John, Danny are graduate research assistants; Talia is an undergraduate Discovery Learning Apprentice, and Greg Lackey is a postdoctoral research associate.

                The well water samples are being analyzed to provide Boulder County with a baseline for groundwater quality before new oil and gas development occurs in eastern Boulder County.  Prof. Joe Ryan obtained funding for the project, and he’s out sampling one day a week, too.  Boulder County recruited the resident volunteers and the EVEN team is scheduling sampling.  The goal is to collect and analyze 400 samples over a 15-month period ending in December, 2018.  The samples are being analyzed for methane and carbon-13 in the INSTAAR Stable Isotope Lab, for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at a commercial lab, and for major ions and trace elements in the LEGS Laboratory in the Geosciences Department.  Results are provided to the residents with interpretation of any anomalies and to Boulder County to assess any groundwater problems associated with new oil and gas development.  Based on work by the NSF-funded AirWaterGas researchers in EVEN, risks to groundwater include oil and gas spills and well construction issues.

                The samplers are encountering many of the challenges associated with sampling private water wells.  They show up at a home, explain the study, and look for a sampling location – ideally a hose fitting near the well and before any house treatment or a cistern, sometimes outside, sometimes in the basement, sometimes in a crawl space (see photo of Mark and Talia in some kind of confined basement utility room).  They purge water from the water system by monitoring pH, conductivity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, and volume – and hope they are getting water from the aquifer, not water that’s been sitting in the pipes.  They sample carefully to avoid headspace in the VOC samples to avoid loss of contaminants from the water.  They preserve the samples to provide holding time until analyses.  They get the sampling equipment and bottles ready for the next day.  They’ll do this for the next year or so as they progress toward the 400 sample target.