Department of Civil Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA.
Department of Plant and Environmental Science, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA.
Sci Total Environ. 2022 Apr 1;815:152943. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.152943. Epub 2022 Jan 7.
Produced water (PW) is a hypersaline waste stream generated from the shale oil and gas industry, consisting of numerous anthropogenic and geogenic compounds. Despite prior geochemical characterization, the comprehensive toxicity assessment is lacking for evaluating treatment technologies and the beneficial use of PW. In this study, a suite of in vitro toxicity assays using various aquatic organisms (luminescent bacterium Vibrio fischeri, fish gill cell line RTgill-W1, and microalgae Scenedesmus obliquus) were developed to investigate the toxicological characterizations of PW from the Permian Basin. The exposure to PW, PW inorganic fraction (PW-IF), and PW salt control (PW-SC) at 30-50% dilutions caused significant toxicological effects in all model species, revealing the high salinity was the foremost toxicological driver in PW. In addition, the toxicity level of PW was usually higher than that of PW-IF, suggesting that organic contaminants might also play a critical role in PW toxicity. When comparing the observed toxicity with associated chemical characterizations in different PW samples, strong correlations were found between them since higher concentrations of contaminants could generally result in higher toxicity towards exposed organisms. Furthermore, the toxicity results from the pretreated PW indicated that those in vitro toxicity assays had different sensitives to the chemical components present in PW. As expected, the combination of multiple pretreatments could lead to a more significant decrease in toxicity compared to the single pretreatment since the mixture of contaminants in PW might exhibit synergistic toxicity. Overall, the current work is expected to enhance our understanding of the potential toxicological impacts of PW to aquatic ecosystems and the relationships between the chemical profiles and observed toxicity in PW, which might be conducive to the establishment of monitoring, remediation, treatment, and reuse protocols for PW.
产出水（PW）是页岩油和天然气工业产生的高盐废水，由许多人为和地质化合物组成。尽管之前进行了地球化学特征描述，但全面的毒性评估对于评估处理技术和 PW 的有益用途是缺乏的。在这项研究中，使用各种水生生物（发光细菌 Vibrio fischeri、鱼类鳃细胞系 RTgill-W1 和微藻 Scenedesmus obliquus）开发了一系列体外毒性测定方法，以研究二叠纪盆地 PW 的毒理学特征。在 30-50%稀释度下，PW、PW 无机部分（PW-IF）和 PW 盐对照（PW-SC）的暴露对所有模式生物都产生了显著的毒性作用，表明高盐度是 PW 中首要的毒性驱动因素。此外，PW 的毒性水平通常高于 PW-IF，表明有机污染物也可能在 PW 毒性中发挥关键作用。当将观察到的毒性与不同 PW 样品中的相关化学特征进行比较时，发现它们之间存在很强的相关性，因为较高浓度的污染物通常会导致暴露生物的毒性更高。此外，预处理 PW 的毒性结果表明，这些体外毒性测定对 PW 中存在的化学成分具有不同的敏感性。正如预期的那样，由于 PW 中的污染物混合物可能表现出协同毒性，因此与单一预处理相比，多种预处理的组合可以导致毒性显著降低。总体而言，这项工作有望提高我们对 PW 对水生生态系统的潜在毒理学影响的认识，以及 PW 中化学特征与观察到的毒性之间的关系，这可能有助于建立 PW 的监测、修复、处理和再利用协议。
