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Low‐Cost Apparatus for On‐Site Monitoring of Methane in Ground Water
Author(s) -
Harrison Samuel S.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
groundwater monitoring and remediation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.677
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-6592
pISSN - 1069-3629
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-6592.1986.tb01242.x
Subject(s) - methane , volume (thermodynamics) , environmental science , atmospheric methane , groundwater , petroleum engineering , contamination , methane emissions , drilling , environmental engineering , chemistry , geology , materials science , geotechnical engineering , ecology , physics , organic chemistry , quantum mechanics , metallurgy , biology
An upsurge in oil‐ and gas‐well drilling in northwestern Pennsylvania and western New York has been accompanied by several incidents of contamination of ground water by methane. Determining which well is causing the contamination is extremely difficult if more than one gas or oil well is present in the area. The fact that the solubility of methane decreases as the pressure on ground water decreases provides a quantitative basis for monitoring changes in the amount of methane in the ground water. Quantitative measurements of the volume of methane given off by ground water pumped from a well as the water enters atmospheric pressure permit detection of temporal changes in the gas content which are too subtle to be detected visually. These gas volume changes may, in some cases, be correlated with variations in the pressure of methane in the annulus of nearby individual gas/oil wells and thus may provide a means of pinpointing the gas/oil well that is causing the methane contamination. The basic principle of the gas‐volume monitoring apparatus (GVMA) described in this paper is that as a measured amount of ground water enters atmospheric pressure the gas which comes out of solution is trapped and measured. The GVMA can be constructed of materials costing less than $100 and requires no special skills to assemble or operate. In a recent study conducted in a western New York village, four homeowners were able to collect quantitative gas‐volume data from their household water wells daily in about one‐half hour. Unlike laboratory analyses for dissolved methane, there is no cost involved in monitoring with the GVMA beyond the initial instrument cost and operator time. Another advantage is that the data are available immediately.