Implications of Rate‐Limited Mass Transfer for Aquifer Storage and Recovery

Abstract

Pressure to decrease reliance on surface water storage has led to increased interest in aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) systems. Recovery efficiency, which is the ratio of the volume of recovered water that meets a predefined standard to total volume of injected fluid, is a common criterion of ASR viability. Recovery efficiency can be degraded by a number of physical and geochemical processes, including rate-limited mass transfer (RLMT), which describes the exchange of solutes between mobile and immobile pore fluids. RLMT may control transport behavior that cannot be explained by advection and dispersion. We present data from a pilot-scale ASR study in Charleston, South Carolina, and develop a three-dimensional finite-difference model to evaluate the impact of RLMT processes on ASR efficiency. The modeling shows that RLMT can explain a rebound in salinity during fresh water storage in a brackish aquifer. Multicycle model results show low efficiencies over one to three ASR cycles due to RLMT degrading water quality during storage; efficiencies can evolve and improve markedly, however, over multiple cycles, even exceeding efficiencies generated by advection-dispersion only models. For an idealized ASR model where RLMT is active, our simulations show a discrete range of diffusive length scales over which the viability of ASR schemes in brackish aquifers would be hindered.

Anomalous transport on regular fracture networks: Impact of conductivity heterogeneity and mixing at fracture intersections

“…Predictability of the observed anomalous transport is essential because it controls the early arrival and the long residence time of particles [22][23][24]. This becomes especially important for environmental and human-health-related issues, such as radionuclide transport in the subsurface [25,26] or water quality evolution in managed aquifer recharge systems [27][28][29].…”

Distributed-order infiltration, absorption and water exchange in mobile and immobile zones of swelling soils

“…The concept of solute movement in porous media with mobile and immobile zones, first proposed by Barenblatt et al (1960), has been investigated over the past five decades (Bolt, 1979;Bond and Wierenga, 1990;Coats and Smith, 1964;Culkin et al, 2008;Culligan et al, 2001;de Smedt and Wierenga, 1979;Deans, 1963;Gamerdinger and Kaplan, 2000;Gao et al, 2009Gao et al, , 2010Gaudet et al, 1977;Gerke and van Genuchten, 1993;Griffioen et al, 1998;Haggerty and Gorelick, 1995;Haggerty et al, 2004;Khuzhayorov et al, 2010;Nielsen and Biggar, 1961;Nielsen et al, 1986;Passioura, 1971;Philip, 1969a;van Genuchten and Wierenga, 1976;Villermaux and van Swaay, 1969). Of these reports, Gao et al (2010) briefly reviewed the development of the mobile-immobile concepts used in analysing flow and solute transport.…”

“…The mobile-immobile concept has been applied to both unsaturated and saturated media (Culkin et al, 2008;Khuzhayorov et al, 2010), and tested using outflow methods or non-destructive methods such as the nuclear magnetic resonance (Culligan et al, 2001). The concept has also been used to describe solute transport in different forms of porous media or under different flow conditions such as density-driven flow (Starr and Parlange, 1976), and macropore flow (Seyfried and Rao, 1987), flow in randomly heterogeneous media (Barry and Sposito, 1989), and stratified porous media (Li et al, 1994).…”

Final Technical Report - Integrated Hydrogeophysical and Hydrogeologic Driven Parameter Upscaling for Dual-Domain Transport Modeling

“…Applications include bimodal permeability fields, such as fractured rock (Bibby 1981;Huyakorn et al 1983) and aggregated soils (Passioura 1971;Rao et al 1980), and more recently, granular aquifers exhibiting more continuous permeability distributions. Examples of the latter are the MADE-2 field site (Boggs et al 1992) on Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi (Feehley et al 2000;Harvey and Gorelick 2000;Julian et al 2001;Zheng and Gorelick 2003;Guan et al 2008; Llopis-Albert and Capilla 2009), alluvial aquifers near Yucca Mountain, Nevada (Painter et al 2001) and Tübingen, Germany (Riva et al 2008), and coastal plain sedimentary aquifers in South Carolina at the U.S. Department of Energy Savannah River Site ) and an Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) site near Charleston (Culkin et al 2008). Other studies focus on laboratory-constructed or synthetic permeability fields involving both binary and continuous permeability variation and varying connectivity of high-permeability zones (Sudicky et al 1985;Zheng and Gorelick 2003;Zinn and Harvey 2003;Zinn et al 2004;Gorelick et al 2005;Liu et al 2007).…”