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California’s Water Windfall Adapted from Information from Stanford University Scientists at Stanford University have discovered California’s Central Valley is concealing three times more groundwater than previously estimated. “It’s not often that you find a water windfall, but we just did,” said study coauthor Robert Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor at Stanford. “There’s far more freshwater and usable water than we expected.” The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , highlights the need to better characterize and pro- tect deep groundwater aquifers not only in California, but in other parched regions as well. “Our findings are relevant to a lot of other places where there are water shortages, including Texas, China, and Australia,” said study coauthor Mary Kang, a postdoctoral associate at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Previous estimates of groundwater in California, are based on data which is decades old and only extends to a maximum depth of 1000 feet or less. Until now, little was known about the amount and quality of water in deeper aquifers. “Water a thousand feet down used to be too expensive to use,” said Jackson, who is also a senior fellow at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. “Today it’s used widely. We need to protect all of our good quality water.” This is great news for California, which is in the midst of its fifth year of severe drought, even leading Governor Jerry Brown to declare a drought emergency for the state in 2014. In the new study, Jackson and Kang used data from 938 oil and gas pools and more than 35,000 oil and gas wells to char- acterize both shallow and deep groundwater sources in eight California counties. The researchers concluded when deeper sources of groundwater are factored in, the amount of usable groundwater in the Central Valley increases to almost triple the state’s current estimates. The findings also raise some concerns. First, much of the water is 1000-3000 feet underground, so pumping it will be more expensive. Without proper studies, tapping these deeper aquifers might also exacerbate the ground subsidence - the gradual sinking of the land. Groundwater pumping from shallow aquifers has already caused some regions to drop by tens of feet. Furthermore, some of the deep aquifer water is higher in salt concentration than shallower water, so desalination or other treatment will be required before it can be used for agri- culture or drinking. Another concern is oil and gas drilling activities occurring directly into as much as 30% of the sites where the deep groundwater resources are located. For example, in Kern County, one in every six cases of oil and gas activities was oc- curring directly into freshwater aquifers. For useable water - water the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency deems drinkable, if treated - the number was one in three. Jackson and Kang stress just because a company has hy- draulically fractured or used some other chemical treatment near an aquifer doesn’t mean the water is ruined. “What we are saying is that no one is monitoring deep aquifers. No one’s following them through time to see how and if the water quality is changing,” Kang said. “We might need to use this water in a decade, so it’s definitely worth protecting.” Editor’s Note: In between our print issues, the WWDR Team prepares an electronic newsletter called E-News Flash . Based on readership, this was the most popular e s F s E-N w la h article of the month. Get in on the action and subscribe today at: http://www.worldwidedrillingresource.org/news-subscription.html 44 SEPTEMBER 2016 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®