Artificial Groundwater Recharge in Santa Marta and Bogotá, Colombia

This paper describes two cases of artificial rechargeArtificial recharge in Colombia; the first one located in the coastal aquiferAquifers of Santa Marta in Northern Colombia, where a recharge structure was built on the Manzanares River; the second located in the capital district of Bogotá, wherein Aquifer Storage and RecoveryAquifer storage and recovery (ASR) pilot test was implemented using a single well for both recharge and pumping. In 1993, the Santa Marta artificial rechargeArtificial recharge project began, the objective of which was to store part of the high flows of the Manzanares River in the unconfined alluvial aquifer to augment the city’s water supply. A recharge structure was built on the riverbed in 1994, operated efficiently for 10 years, and was then removed in 2004 because water quality conditions deteriorated, the city expanded, and therefore river flow decreased. The ASR test site, with a single injection and abstraction well and an observation well, both up to about 300 m deep, was established in 2002 in a Cretaceous sandstone aquiferAquifers located in a mountainous area of Bogotá, near a water treatment plant, enabling the use of clean water which should avoid well clogging during injection. Since it is an area with complex structural geology with several local and regional faults and confined conditions, the water level in the injection well was very close to the surface, and the observation well showed artesian conditions. This implies that positive pressure on the injected water was required for the ASR to function. The tests indicated good potential for ASR in the Bogotá region, especially in areas of aquiferAquifers depletion.