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A Typical Groundwater Storage Assessment in the Tugela Area, South Africa

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A Typical Groundwater Storage Assessment in the Tugela Area, South Africa A typical groundwater storage assessment in the Tugela area, South Africa Haili Lin & Lixiang Lin Hydrogeology Journal Official Journal of the International Association of Hydrogeologists ISSN 1431-2174 Volume 27 Number 3 Hydrogeol J (2019) 27:827-840 DOI 10.1007/s10040-018-1897-9 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer- Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Hydrogeology Journal (2019) 27:827–840 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-018-1897-9 REPORT A typical groundwater storage assessment in the Tugela area, South Africa Haili Lin1 & Lixiang Lin1 Received: 8 March 2018 /Accepted: 7 November 2018 /Published online: 19 November 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Water storage assessment is an important component of feasibility studies for prospective mining areas. As required by national mineral resources and environmental Acts, this may include assessment of both exploitable and sustainable storage; the former relates to the amount of groundwater stored within the exploitable aquifer depth and the latter is defined as the groundwater that can be sustainably extracted without producing unacceptable environmental and economic problems. A simplified method is proposed to assess the groundwater storage in a typical mine area, Tugela in South Africa. In the area, five aquifers (Natal Group, Coastal plain deposits, Basement aquifer, Ecca Group and Dwyka Group) have better harvest potential compared with others on the basis of borehole yield. The study area was divided into four subareas (A, B, C and F) based on proposed mining boundaries. Both exploitable and sustainable groundwater storage were estimated. The estimated exploitable groundwater storage for sub- areas A, B, C and F are 20.66, 5.78, 43.12, 36.90 Mm3, respectively, on the basis of current median exploitation depths of each aquifer or geological formation. The calculated sustainable groundwater storage for subareas A, B, C and F are 3.31, 0.89, 6.67 and 6.01 Mm3, respectively, with a total of 16.88 Mm3. Groundwater recharge of the subareas was also estimated for subareas A, B, C and F as 31.92, 11.44, 43.38 and 29.78 Mm3/annum, respectively, with a total of 116.53 Mm3/annum. The assessment method can be applied to other areas with similar hydrogeological settings with the available datasets. Keywords Groundwater storage . Sustainability . Groundwater recharge/water budget . South Africa . Sub-Saharan Africa Introduction key components in determining groundwater availability (DWA 2013). Water is perhaps South Africa’s most critical resource, one of Many scientific efforts have been made to the study of low abundance and growing needs. The country is located in groundwater recharge, discharge and associated sustainability an arid to semi-arid region where less than 10% of rainfall is (ASCE 1972; Bredehoeft 1997;Xuetal.2003; Sophocleous available as surface water, and groundwater resources are and Devlin 2004;AlleyandLeake2004;Zhou2009). Very equally limited (DWA 2011). As the use of surface water limited work has been done in terms of the determination of has reached the upper limit of the resource in this country, it groundwater storage since its concept and methods were pro- is hence important to have a better understanding of the status posed by Pulotenikov (1959). Groundwater storage is the ba- quo of groundwater resources and their availability. sis of sustainable development which is presented as the vol- According to relevant governmental Acts in mineral re- ume of water stored in an aquifer or aquifer system with the sources, water and environment management, in any new de- dimension of liters (L3). It is accumulated in a long-term dy- veloping area, assessment of water resources availability namic process of the interaction of recharge, flow, and dis- needs to be carried out compulsorily, of which the issues of charge. In the long run, when the balance between groundwa- groundwater storage, recharge and sustainable yield are three ter recharge and discharge stays relatively stable, the account of groundwater storage is also stable. However, if the recharge varies periodically, for example, with the seasonal variation of * Haili Lin rainfall, the balance will be disturbed and the storage and [email protected] discharge will change accordingly. For some aquifers such as fractured porous and dolomitic aquifers and alluvial de- 1 Council for Geoscience, Pretoria, South Africa posits, while the amount of recharge is less than expected, part Author's personal copy 828 Hydrogeol J (2019) 27:827–840 of the storage will be released to satisfy the groundwater dis- and applicable assessment. For example, in GRA2, all results charge including natural discharge and artificial abstraction in have the resolution of 1 km × 1 km, which is apparently low a specific area. On the other hand, excessive recharge will for a local or site study and ranges from well-field scale to enhance storage. Generally, storage can be regarded as a buff- several thousand square kilometres. Some datasets have been er zone in the hydrogeological cycle to adjust between re- developed from previous project results so that specific charge and discharge and, therefore, has much significance boundaries i.e. quaternary drainage and national groundwater in evaluating groundwater resources. regions, were used to derive the average data such as aquifer In South Africa, research on the quantification of ground- thickness and storativity values over the bounded area. water resources on a regional scale has come a long way since However in a small scale study, a geological/ 1980s. For example, the publication Groundwater Resources hydrogeological boundary is relatively easy to identify and of South Africa, consisting of a report and maps as the output provides more accurate estimates when assessing aquifer of the first national hydrogeological mapping program, was properties. According to statistics of National Groundwater published by the Water Resource Commission (Vegter 1995). Archive (NGA) boreholes, the average aquifer thickness used The maps present South Africa’s groundwater resources with in GRA2 in South Africa is 154 m, which is largely biased by seven components, including saturated indices, depth of deep exploration boreholes and is much higher than 90% of groundwater level, mean annual groundwater recharge, the borehole depths in South Africa, thus not applicable for groundwater component of river flow, groundwater quality most groundwater supplying projects. Based on all above, the and hydrochemical types. In 1998, the Groundwater Harvest groundwater assessment results on a national scale cannot be Potential map of South Africa was published (Baron et al. directly used and it is necessary to develop an easy and appli- 1998), which estimated the sustainable rates of groundwater cable way for groundwater quantification at a local scale. abstraction in South Africa on a country-wide basis. Regional This paper selects the Tugela new mining area as a typical estimates of storage and recharge were used to calculate this study area and attempts to propose a convenient method to sustainable yield (Woodford et al. 2009). Based on all the evaluate groundwater storage at a local scale. Geological and previous work, Directorate: Geohydrology, Department of hydrogeological settings in the study area are discussed, on Water Affairs (DWA) initiated the development of a series of which the aquifers are classified. Two forms of groundwater hydrogeological maps on a scale of 1:500,000 and the work storage, exploitable storage and sustainable storage, are de- was completed in 2003 (Woodford and Rosewarne, 2006). fined and calculated for each aquifer using geological infor- The produced Hydrogeological Map Series is regarded as mation and borehole data from NGA. the first full set of regional hydrogeological information of South Africa. However, no groundwater resource quantifica- tion was carried out in Groundwater Resources Assessment Materials and methods project phase 1 (GRA1). The Groundwater Resources Assessment project phase 2 (GRA2) began in 2003 with the Study area aim to quantify aquifer storage, recharge, baseflow and the groundwater reserve, which was completed in 2005. The out- The selected study area, with a size of 5621 km2, is located in puts of GRA2 include a country-wide 1 km × 1 km grid show- the central-eastern part of KwaZulu-Natal Province mostly ing average groundwater storage and a country-wide 1 km × along the Tugela River catchment. It has been identified as 1 km grid showing current groundwater storage based on the one of the new mining areas for heavy minerals and gems. previous year’s input data (especially recharge and abstrac- Based on proposed mining boundaries, the area was divided tion). The methodology is described in a series of DWA re- into four subareas, i.e. A, B, C and F, as shown in Fig. 1.It ports (Witthuser et al. 2009). comprises two primary drainage basins (V and W), six sec- Groundwater resource quantification on a national scale ondary basins, seven tertiary and over 60 quaternary basins hasmanybenefitsbyproviding: (Middleton and Bailey 2008). The western part of the area (subareas A and B) includes the low-lying wide Tugela & an general overview of the groundwater storage/ River Valley, the high-elevation forest (the Qudeni Forest availability in the country; Reserve), as well as a forested area to the north.
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