The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory dedicated to advancing the nation’s energy future, recently updated its National Energy Water Treatment & Speciation (NEWTS) database to include data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
NEWTS contains geochemical and geospatial data from wastewater sample records spanning 48 states. It was developed to measure the impact of energy production on water quality and model treatment options. With the update, it now contains data from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing operations. More than 1,000 produced water streams from Marcellus natural gas well sites had reported the data to DEP. NETL reformatted the data for compatibility with geochemical modeling software.
“The new dataset enables communities in the Marcellus region to not only identify chemicals in produced water and use the software to plan remediation strategies, but it also determines if the produced water in their areas contains lithium or other critical minerals, which could be extracted and used as a revenue source to offset the cost of community improvements,” Nick Siefert, NETL researcher and NEWTS co-developer, said.
Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale production wastewater could meet 38 percent to 40 percent of current domestic lithium consumption, according to NETL research. Lithium is a critical mineral used in rechargeable batteries. Foreign countries control its supply, and the development of a domestic lithium supply is a national priority.
The Marcellus Shale formation extends under three-fifths of Pennsylvania, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and hydraulic fracturing there is used to produce natural gas from the fine-grained rock.
Prior to the development of NEWTS, it was difficult to find and use data from collected samples of energy-process water because it was managed by various state and federal regulatory agencies and often was stored in nonstandard formats.
NEWTS unified and standardized energy-related wastewater data, making it easy for water authorities, municipalities, and other public and private entities to seamlessly input data into water treatment software programs and develop remediation models.
NETL has a laboratory in Pittsburgh.