Assessing the transport and fate of MTBE
amended petroleum hydrocarbons in the UK Chalk aquifer
G P Wealthall, S F Thornton and D N Lerner
Groundwater Protection and Restoration Group, University of Sheffield, UK
www.sheffield.ac.uk/gprg
Site Characteristics
Exploded diagram of a sampling port
in the Solinst® CMT monitoring system
The site is an urban retail petroleum filling station in southern England and overlies the Chalk aquifer, the most important aquifer system in the UK. The site characterisation programme involved the design and installation of multilevel groundwater sampling devices at three borehole locations:
- Upgradient of the site to determine ‘baseline’ characteristics of the Chalk aquifer
- 30 m downgradient in the complex BTEX and MTBE/TAME plume
- 115 m downgradient in the MTBE/TAME-only plume
The boreholes were instrumented with the recently developed continuous multi-channel tubing (CMT) system which has allowed detailed level-specific characterisation of contaminant spatial distribution from seven discrete intervals in a single well.
