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River Water Quality

River Water Quality

River Water Quality

(OP)
I teach a class that includes a section on Oil & Gas industry Produced Water Disposal.  The class is very much U.S.-centric, but I teach it in international locations.

One of the slides compares Water Quality standards, to a local river near my home, to the quality of produced water in a CBM (Coalbed Methane or Coalseam Gas) field.  I was looking to change my example river from U.S. to somewhere on another continent, but I've been unable to find a Cation/Anion analysis with TDS, pH, and turbidity for a major river.  I'd like to use the Thames, Danube, Nile, Amazon, or the Yangtze, or any river that has wide recognition around the world, but I have been wildly unsuccessful finding any gross-level information on any major river that is used for a municipal water supply.  I can find a lot of information about the specific trace elements that people are concerned about today, but not Sodium or pH.

Does anyone have an example water analysis from a major river that they would be willing to share?  Thank you.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
www.muleshoe-eng.com
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RE: River Water Quality

(OP)
Thank you bimr.  The annual report was interesting reading, but all the data was number of exceedences within water supplies.  I have to think that the Water Quality Reports were after municipal treatment (I saw a jar of Thames River water in London last month and the turbidity was certainly greater than <0.1 FTU, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't crystal clear either).

David

RE: River Water Quality

It appears that the only parameters that would show appreciable change from raw water to finished water are the turbidity and chlorination.   

RE: River Water Quality

Thames as measured at Oxford yesterday (flow rate 1398.4Mld)- Nitrate 6.2mgl, Ammonia <0.01mgl, Turbidity 2.9 NTU. pH 8.37.

Min and max results this year:

Nitrate     <0.1mgl       10.1mgl
Ammonia     <0.01mgl      0.27mgl
Turb        1.9NTU        65.9NTU
pH          7.89          8.98

RE: River Water Quality

(OP)
Any idea what TDS goes with those readings?

David

RE: River Water Quality

(OP)
Thank you.  I am having a hard time with those TDS numbers.  The EPA limit for drinking water in the U.S. is 500 mg/L, and the pristine fishing river near here usually runs 250 mg/L (with a turbidity of 3.5).  The Varder has 8 mg/L TDS, 20 mg/L TSS, and 7.5 turbidity.  With that turbidity I'd expect the numbers to be g/L instead of mg/L.  The Thames data that bimr pointed me to was similar to the Vardar.

I guess I'm going to have to dig into this further.

David

RE: River Water Quality

(OP)
That was interesting bimr.  The summary chapter has a table of total volume and total dissolved solids.  Dividing the two for the whole world shows 130 mg/L as the global average.  I looked at 20 individual rivers and got numbers between 100 and 350 mg/L which is what I expected.  The single digit numbers in other reports are confusing me.

David

RE: River Water Quality

zdas04,

Sorry about that, the numbers for TDS/TSS I posted I'd read wrong.

In 7/09 in the Vardar:
TDS (Total Filterable Residue) was 365 mg/L
TSS (Total Non-Filterable Residue) was 385 mg/L.

Please ignore the previous TDS and TSS values.

ekolog

RE: River Water Quality

(OP)
Thanks for clearing that up.  I thought TDS would be the non-filterable part (since it is disolved) and TSS would be the filterable part (since it is suspended).

David

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