A good water resourcing studies shall evaluate every angles of the available water potential in terms of quantity, quality, economical to develop and even to the extend of conjunctive usage between surface and ground water resources.
Surface water seem to be popular to the local authority since it can be easily identified, measured and treated, but the major disadvantages of surface water, it can be easily affected by pollution, especially in an urban environment.
The next best alternative is to tap ground water from the local area. Ground water in most cases can easily be developed and utilized, provide that proper abstraction methodology is applied.
The ground formation in which ground water is confine known as aquifer can be visualized as in fig.2 below:
Fig.2: Ground water aquifer
Ground water aquifer potential varies due to several factors, mainly its geology and hydro geology, in other words, the type of soil formation and its properties, and depth that contribute the piezometric pressure to speed up the flow rate of ground water upon abstraction.
In Malaysia, shallow aquifer being highly utilized in the East Coast region such as Kota Bharu, Kelantan. The deep aquifer is more popular in the West Coast region such as in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur.
The shallow aquifer of depth less than 30 meters exist in old river bed, valley and coastal area of sandy formation, while the deep aquifer of depth greater than 30 meters and even reached to 200 meters is tapped from the fractured zone of hard rock formation such as in granite, meta sediments of shale, schist etc. or cavities of limestone.
The flow rates of these ground water wells depend much on the geology and hydro geology, and also dependent on the construction technology and the well design of the production well.
The selection and the design of a good groundwater production well shall required ground water expertise of good knowledge and experience.
coming next... groundwater well drilling and construction technology...
