A new operational paradigm is presented for small-scale aquifer storage and recovery systems (ASR) in saline aquifers. Regular ASR is often not feasible for small-scale storage in saline aquifers because fresh water floats to the top of the aquifer where it is unrecoverable. In the new paradigm, fresh water storage is combined with salt water extraction from below the fresh water cone. The salt water extraction counteracts the buoyancy due to the density difference between fresh water and salt water, thus preventing the fresh water from floating up. The proposed approach is applied to assess the feasibility of ASR for the seasonal storage of fresh water produced by desalination plants in tourist resorts along the Egyptian Red Sea coast. In these situations, the continuous extraction of salt water can be used for desalination purposes. An analytical Dupuit solution is presented for the steady flow of salt water toward a well with a volume of fresh water floating on top of the cone of depression. The required salt water discharge for the storage of a given volume of fresh water can be computed with the analytical solution. Numerical modeling is applied to determine how the stored fresh water can be recovered. Three recovery approaches are examined. Fresh water recovery rates on the order of 70% are achievable when salt water is extracted in high volumes, subsurface impermeable barriers are constructed at a distance from the well, or several fresh water recovery drains are used. The effect of ambient flow and interruptions of salt water pumping on the recovery efficiency are reported.

Regular aquifer storage recovery, ASR, is often not feasible for small-scale storage in brackish or saline aquifers because fresh water floats to the top of the aquifer where it is unrecoverable. Flow barriers that partially penetrate a brackish or saline aquifer prevent a stored volume of fresh water from expanding sideways, thus increasing the recovery efficiency. In this paper, the groundwater flow and mixing is studied during injection, storage, and recovery of fresh water in a brackish or saline aquifer in a flow-tank experiment and by numerical modeling to investigate the effect of density difference, hydraulic conductivity, pumping rate, cyclic operation, and flow barrier settings. Two injection and recovery methods are investigated: constant flux and constant head. Fresh water recovery rates on the order of 65% in the first cycle climbing to as much as 90% in the following cycles were achievable for the studied configurations with constant flux whereas the recovery efficiency was somewhat lower for constant head. The spatial variation in flow velocity over the width of the storage zone influences the recovery efficiency, because it induces leakage of fresh water underneath the barriers during injection and upconing of salt water during recovery.

Spatially constant porosity and hydraulic conductivity are usually applied in hydrological studies related to land reclamations. However, the grain sorting and the degree of compaction within land reclamations differ per placement method. A study area at Maasvlakte II, the Netherlands, and the four other land reclamations that could be found in the literature are considered that were constructed by a combination of bottom dumping, rainbowing and discharging the sand-water mixture by pipeline. The structures of the porous media are derived for each placement method and validated by comparison with semi-variograms of cone-penetration tests. It is found that all placement methods lead to some degree of heterogeneity, so that the hydraulic conductivity in these land reclamations is not constant. This is due to the degree of segregation of the grain sizes that differs between placement methods. Segregation even varies within a specific placement method because of its characteristics and site-specific circumstances such as settling depth, grain-size distribution and angularity resulting from grain type. If land reclamations are considered for aquifer storage and recovery for freshwater supply, it should be considered that the recovery efficiency will be affected by both the properties of the material in the borrow area and by the placement methods including their spatial configuration as applied during construction of the reclamation.

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