NGWA Event and Education Recordings Archive

Horizontal drilling technology and hydraulic fracturing techniques have rapidly advanced due to the value of the geologic resources, primarily oil and natural gas, which can be exploited with the combined methods. Resource managers, government regulators, and the public are frequently left with few options for unbiased guidance as they seek to understand and control how new procedures and trends affect the areas they are most concerned with: public well-being and environmental concerns. The interactions between public water resource issues and hydrogeologic processes/ecosystems are very complex. The potential impacts from an unprecedented commodity extraction technique place an added burden on the water resource manager, whether it is at the state, watershed, or local level. The primary need for managing any process is viable data. Monitoring to establish valid, meaningful, and complete scientific data will be needed to assure those who are non-specialists that the use of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas development is tolerable from a cost-benefit perspective. Technically defensible scientific data may promote cooperation between public, private, and political interests with regard to the proper management of potential impacts to water resources in Tennessee. The primary concerns are (1) geological monitoring blind spots, unknown structural or inherent discontinuities in the native rock which could cause loss of control over some aspect of the drilling or fracturing process, and (2) the nature of potential water resource impacts. Water resource systems can be affected by physical disruptions to the natural hydrologic cycle components of recharge, discharge, and storage, or the chemical interplay of water-rock reactions, liquid-gas interactions, and biochemical effects on water quality. Ideally, a balance will be struck between the economic gains associated with new oil and gas development techniques and the monitoring needed to qualify the potential risks to present or future water resource values in Tennessee.