Groundwater quality assessment along the West of New Damietta Coastal City of Egypt using an integrated geophysical and hydrochemical approaches

Environmental Earth Sciences (2023) 82:107 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-023-10762-0 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Groundwater quality assessment along the West of New Damietta Coastal City of Egypt using an integrated geophysical and hydrochemical approaches Gehad Gamal1 · Taher Mohammed Hassan2 · Ahmed Gaber1 · Mohamed Abdelfattah1 Received: 10 August 2022 / Accepted: 14 January 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract Recently, the groundwater became very important source for the Egyptian water balance. Therefore, assessing its quality and quantity is necessary before initiating any developmental plans using this resource. In this research, a new operated power plant, which is located in the coastal area of West New Damietta City, north-east of Egypt was designed to work using the coastal groundwater aquifer. Therefore, an integrated approaches of both geophysical methods and hydrochemical analysis were applied to identify the subsurface lithology, the water-bearing layers and determine the potential use of such coastal groundwater. Therefore, a total of seventeen vertical electrical soundings (VES) and five time-domain electromagnetic soundings (TEM) were performed. Moreover, groundwater samples were collected from seven existing wells to be analyzed for water quality assessment. The geophysical results identified five geoelectric layers. The first geoelectric layer has a resistivity of 1–7.9 Ω m and a thickness range of 7–9 m. The second layer has a resistivity of 0.9–4.4 Ω m and a thickness range of 7–8 m. The third layer is 10–21 m thick with a resistivity value of 0.5–2 Ω m. The fourth layer, which is thicker (29 to 42 m), has a resistivity of 0.7–3 Ω m, while the last layer has a resistivity of 1.7–9 Ω m. According to the hydrochemical analysis, the aquifer is dominated by Na–Cl water type. The brackish nature of the water is revealed by the TDS range of 7035 mg/l to 7735 mg/l. The results collected demonstrate the groundwater's quantity and quality availability for the power plant’s sustainable use. Keywords Groundwater assessment · Hydrochemistry · Geophysics · Coastal aquifer · West New Damietta · Egypt Abbreviations VES Vertical electrical soundings TEM Time-domain electromagnetic TDS The total dissolved solids EC Electric conductivity S.W.L Static water level WHO World Health Organization ppm Part per million * Gehad Gamal 1 Geology Department, Faculty of Science, Port Said University, Port Said, Egypt 2 National Water Research Centre, Research Institute for Groundwater, Cairo, Egypt Introduction Coastal areas have become progressively developed around the world. They cover over 10% of the planet’s surface and contain more than half of the world's population, as well as human activities (Chatton et al. 2016). The Egyptian coastal region is undergoing tremendous demographic, environmental, economic, and social developments with a high concentration of water-demanding human activities (De Filippis et al. 2016). Development projects, including agriculture, domestic water use, and electricity generation, require a sustainable supply of fresh water. In the absence of applicability of the nearby surface water resources, the demand for groundwater resources is the alternative (Eltarabily and Negm 2019). West New Damietta is one of Egypt’s coastal regions, located northeast of the Nile Delta, where the increase in human demands and the expansion of national projects have necessitated the need for long-term water supplies. Therefore, this research is to investigate the groundwater 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 107 Page 2 of 14 potentiality within the study area by using geophysical techniques. Regarding the direct relationship between the hydraulic characteristics of geological formations and existing fluids, electrical and electromagnetic geophysical techniques have been widely used in coastal hydrogeological investigations (Freeze and Cherry 1979; Stewart 1981; Fitterman and Stewart 1986; Duque et al. 2008; Zarroca et al. 2011). Electrical method is the most widely utilized technology for investigating groundwater resources due to its excellent performance (De breuck and De moor 1969; Choudhury and Saha 2004; Adepelumi et al. 2009; Himi et al. 2017). Recently, numerous research also has shown the accuracy of the TEM approach (Meju et al. 2000; Guérin et al. 2001; Danielsen et al. 2003; Tsourlos et al. 2004; Kontar and Ozorovich 2006; Metwaly et al. 2006; Barlow and Reichard 2010; Soupios et al. 2010; Trabelsi et al. 2013; Herckenrath et al. 2013; Kanta et al. 2013; Gonçalves et al. 2017; Himi et al. 2017) due to its sensitivity to conductive anomalies (Abdelfattah et al. 2021). Groundwater quality is critical because it affects the capability of water for numerous applications. It is very important to define groundwater quality and its hydrogeochemical characterization for assessing whether or not this water is suitable for various purposes. Chemicals that are dissolved in water may have long-term negative effects on human health as well as cause cosmetic problems (Ahmed et al. 2019). As a result, anthropogenic activity and waste outflow with hazardous mixtures generate major problems for aquatic ecosystem communities and have a potential impact on human health (Duruibe et al. 2007). The valuable resources such as water resources have been polluted by land- and water-based societal activities, and in certain cases, the exploitation of these resources might contaminate the nearby aquifers (Vasanthavigar et al. 2010). Fig. 1  Location map of the power plant (study area) 13 Environmental Earth Sciences (2023) 82:107 Many studies were carried out on groundwater quality evaluation and hydrochemical characterization (Brindha et al. 2014; Sajil Kumar et al. 2014; Wu et al. 2014, 2015; Bouzourra et al. 2015; Vetrimurugan and Elango 2015; Li et al. 2016). In addition, many researchers in Egypt have focused on groundwater resources in terms of quality (Masoud 2014; Armanuos et al. 2016; Negm and Armanuos 2017; El-Rawy et al. 2019; Salem et al. 2019; Ding et al. 2020; Hegazy et al. 2020; Mansour 2020; El-Kholy et al. 2022). The physical and chemical properties of groundwater are influenced by both natural and anthropogenic causes. Natural factors include lithology, groundwater velocity, water–rock interaction, evaporation/crystallization, oxidation or reduction reactions, salt solubility and recharge water quality; anthropogenic factors entail agriculture, industry, mining, urban development, etc. (Jeong 2001; Hussein 2004; Hosseinifard and Mirzaei Aminiyan 2015). Numerous investigations focused on evaluating the hydrochemical changes and showing their spatial distributions using geographic information systems (GIS) (Ahmed et al. 2020a, b) as well as statistical techniques (Ahmed et al. 2020a). Therefore, this study aims at identifying the groundwater quality close to the newly constructed power plant in New Damietta coastal area and evaluate the underneath coastal aquifer (...truncated)