Everyone is familiar with the water cut statistics: three to seven barrels of produced water emerge from the ground per barrel of oil. This oft-cited statistic is useful to appreciate the scale of the volumes of water produced in the Permian Basin. However, it does not tell the whole story.
Proficiency Testing (PT) is the name used by the International Standards Organization for a procedure also known as “inter-laboratory study” or “external quality assessment” or “ring test”. Proficiency testing, in simple terms, comprises a sample sent to a group of laboratories for measurement. The labs know what might be in the sample, but they don’t know exactly what is there or the concentration. Their results are compared with the known or true value and the lab is assigned a “Z” score to show how closely their result came to the target.
Fifty-one billion gallons. That’s the average amount of water flowing into Chesapeake Bay on a daily basis. And as all that water seeps, flows, and cascades across the watershed before it spills out into the Bay — the nation’s largest estuary — it picks up signature characteristics of where it has been.
Environmental Health Assessments (EHAs) are used to better understand the range of possible effects of environmental factors on a community’s health and wellbeing. These assessments are defined by EPA researchers as “methodical evaluations of air, water, and soil pollution impacts on human health and the environment.”
Though the elephant in the room (Texas v. New Mexico court case) loomed large, hundreds of water researchers and experts who converged for the second annual Two Nations One Water summit in Las Cruces, NM, quickly went to work to explore water strategies for managing shared water resources amidst drought, climate uncertainties, and population growth.
Water is essential to life. And it is a very precious commodity in Israel, home to 9 million people living in a rocky desert that receives about 10 inches of rain a year. By comparison, Denver, considered semi-arid, gets about 15 inches of rain a year, which is about a fourth of the precipitation a tropical city such as Miami receives.
As PFAS and a host of other pollutants threaten water systems and erode public confidence, the water industry fights back with a comprehensive action plan.
The question of liability and oversight pertaining to the pollution of “navigable waters” via groundwater flow is on the docket for the Supreme Court — and on the minds of wastewater treatment operators.
They say we all live downstream from someone and upstream from someone else — a reminder, quite literal for the water industry, of our interconnectedness and responsibility to others. In New York, the Army Corps of Engineers proved how relatively small infrastructure improvements can have outsized impact.
While climate change repercussions are predicted to be varied and ubiquitous, it is the fate of water that deserves highest consideration, as the prosperity of communities —and countries — hangs in the balance.
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