Geoforensic tracing of contaminants and emissions: Monitoring watersheds, petroleum, and helium operations

Climate change and environmental pollution is consistently ranked as one of the greatest global catastrophic risks of this generation. Not only are there an incredible number of pollutants to monitor, but this threat also exacerbates widespread issues regarding food safety, water contamination, and health concerns. It follows that environmental protection is a significant target for policymakers with comprehensive monitoring needed for air, water, and soil. Applying geochemical tracers to track pollutants linked to various industrial projects develops the framework to identify sources of pollution, outline the scope of the issue, and monitor remediation progress. However, industrial partnerships can be cost-prohibitive with little access for academic publishing. This limits regulatory framework development through sporadic usage of environmental tracers in monitoring programs and siloed data saving. This thesis applies different tracers in multiple substrates to obtain a holistic interpretation of dynamic issues with clear indicators for threats to human health and/or the environment. Compositional and isotopic tracers have been applied to rising nitrate contamination in Lake Erie tributaries (Chapter 2), sulfurous species in Athabasca bitumen (Chapter 3), carbon dioxide co-injection in a carbon capture and storage pilot project (Chapter 4), and greenhouse gas emission accounting from the helium industry (Chapter 5). All chapters published within this research seek to apply a universal geochemical tracing workflow to simplify environmental monitoring regardless of substrate type. Application of tracers in these different industry sectors are selected to demonstrate usage in long-term data monitoring projects and cultivate exemplars for future work. Effectiveness of proposed tracers are explored with a critical assessment for areas of improvement and recommendations for successful source delineation.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.Sc.

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Grantor

University of Windsor

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Beaton, Meagan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Scott Mundle

Contributors dc:contributor

• scholarship@uwindsor.ca

Licence

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_CA

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14776/8747

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwindsor.scholaris.ca:20.500.14776/8747