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This page has the most recent posts listed according to date, most recent first.

The archive of all the posts is at sootypaws.livejournal.com.

Recent posts in the archive:

Cats and More Cats
30 May 2010

Exploding Tanks
16 May 2010

Critters
14 May 2010

The Road
24 April 2010

Spring Flowers
14 April 2010

Cycles
3 April 2010

Walking the Cats
25 March 2010

The Lost Hollow
25 February 2010

2009 Gas Well Study Is Available
9 February 2010

The Woods
9 February 2010

Hunkered Down for Winter
6 January 2010

A Few Winter Photographs
13 December 2009

Buckeye Creek Update
28 November 2009

One Thing After Another
28 November 2009

Communities
17 October 2009

Getting Ready for Winter
13 October 2009

Risk Assessment, Part One
3 October 2009

Risk Assessment, Part Two
3 October 2009

The Numbers
26 September 2009

Buckeye Creek
26 September 2009

Collecting a Sample for Laboratory Analysis
18 September 2009

40 Years
12 September 2009

Wetzel County
6 September 2009

Coalbed Methane
29 August 2009

Turtles
8 August 2009

Chloride
2 August 2009

Bits and Pieces
25 July 2009

Chloride in the Woods
19 July 2009

Bobo
5 July 2009

Chloride Testing
13 June 2009

Kitty Boy Outside
6 June 2009

A Pretty Picture?
31 May 2009

A Busy Week
23 May 2009

Kitty Boy
16 May 2009

Pulpits and Drill Pits
9 May 2009

The Bhopal 25th Anniversary Survivors’ Tour
3 May 2009

Pits
28 April 2009

Pit Liners
26 April 2009

Bookshelves
23 April 2009

Fracturing Chemicals
18 April 2009

A Short (Very Short) History of Fracturing
18 April 2009

Bulging Boreholes!
18 April 2009

What Happened at Fernow
17 April 2009

SAR
17 April 2009

New Content on Website
4 April 2009

Liming the Pit
28 March 2009

Fernow Experimental Forest
28 March 2009

Oops!
27 March 2009

Around Home

Around Home
21 March 2009

Math Problem
14 March 2009

Spring
10 March 2009

More New Content on Website
1 March 2009

New Content on Website
23 February 2009

Wind Storm
17 February 2009

A Good Job
8 February 2009

Grades and Slopes, 2
7 February 2009

Where We Live
26 January 2009

New Content on Site
25 January 2009

Grades and Slopes
14 January 2009

Nuts to Winter
2 January 2009

Kablooie!
20 December 2008

The Toxic Well
6 December 2008

Land and Air
4 December 2008

New content on Sootypaws
29 November 2008

Bobo and His Human
22 November 2008

Culverts
November 2008

Research
9 November 2008

Dozer Tracks
22 November 2008

Walk Through the Asbury Property
26 October 2008

Fracturing
8 October 2008

Last Saturday
29 September 2008

Local Wells
27 September 2008

Clovis
21 September 2008

A quick update
17 September 2008

The Woods
15 September 2008

From beauty to desert "It's all about money"
12 September 2008

The Gas Well
9 September 2008

News!
6 September 2008

 

Posted 17 August 2010

Fracture Waste

In West Virginia, under the current General Permit, wastes from fracturing a well can be land applied. This waste comes in two forms -- unused fracturing chemicals dumped into the pit and fracture flowback discharged from the well into the pit.

According to the General Permit unused fracture chemicals cannot be dumped into a pit but it's hard to tell if the operators' crews know this. The state's Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) shows the decision tree for determining under which pit category pit waste falls and indicates that chemicals and flowback can be in a pit:

Only category 1 pits do not have fracture flowback or chemicals. Of the small number of DMRs we've examined, all have been for category 2 or 4 pits.

The EPA's exemption of oil and gas wastes does allow the land application of drill waste, flowback, and even chemicals, but the exemption does not allow the addition of unused chemicals to production waste that is covered by the exemption (drill waste and flowback) if the chemicals exhibit certain hazardous characteristics and if the pit waste then assumes those characteristics. These hazardous characteristics are reactivity, corrosivity, ignitability and toxicity. Or, if the chemicals are listed in 40CFR261, subpart D, then the waste is no longer exempt.

Almost nothing is known about the chemicals used for fracturing in West Virginia. The Office of Oil and Gas website publishes an incomplete list of chemicals. The list is incomplete in that it does not show all the chemicals used in a typical fracture job (the biocide is missing, for instance), nor does it show the proprietary chemicals which manufacturers won't disclose. For the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) I've seen, these proprietary, unnamed chemicals, can form 10% to 60% of a product.

Proprietary chemicals may be innocuous or they may be toxic. They may be those listed in 40CFR261, which makes disposal costly because the waste is no longer exempt.

These unknown proprietary chemicals must be assumed to fall in a worst case scenario -- are hazardous in one way (by their characteristic) or another (are listed).

The Office of Oil and Gas has allowed this waste to be land applied without knowing what makes up this waste -- the products or chemicals used. But even if the Office had full disclosure from the operators, it would not be getting full disclosure from the manufacturers.

It's our belief that fracture flowback should not be land applied and that fracture chemicals should not be dumped into drill waste pits. Unused fracture chemicals should be disposed of otherwise and properly.

The MSDS evidence is, as I mentioned above, sparse. Three products known to have been used in West Virginia create particular concern. These Halliburton products (though Halliburton is not the only company making fracturing and drilling products) are: BC-140 (a cross linker); BE-3S Bactericide; and SP Breaker (a post-fracture gel breaker). Clicking on the product names will produce the applicable MSDS Adobe Acrobat document. We have a page on our website that explains the purpose of some of these chemicals.

These products weren't used in exceptionally large quantities. Their hazards are noted on the MSDS sheets (sections 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 15) and include ecological, human health, storage and regulatory issues. Only the SP Breaker exhibits a hazardous characteristic (two in the MSDS version when the product was used -- ignitability and reactivity). Waste should, if exposed to this product, according to the EPA exemption, be tested to determine if it is still exempt.

A quick addendum: The Office of Oil and Gas has just decided that fracture flowback from Marcellus wells cannot be land applied.

Comments

Posted 14 July 2010

Junior Book Goats

Blondie and Grey are fully weaned and are eating up a storm, probably twice as much each day as the big guys Bobo and Kitty Boy. Their area of exploration is slowly encompassing the whole house and they are interacting well with the big guys. Kitty Boy is utterly entranced with the idea of new playmates and he can't wait for them to get bigger (we have to watch him so that things don't get too rough). He's taken to bringing toys up from the addition to show the kittens and to let them play with and he's been giving demonstrations on how to play best with a ball.

Blondie and Grey love our book piles and exploring the book shelves (they can only reach the lowest shelves for now). They are junior book goats!

More soon!

Comments

Posted 29 June 2010

New Content on Website

I've just added two new pages to the website devoted to Grey and Blondie, two kittens abandoned by a feral mother, and being hand-raised by us. We have lots ore photos and when there's time we'll be adding more pages. The first page devoted to the kittens is in the Cats section of the website.

The kittens started eating solid food today! More soon.

Comments

Posted 24 June 2010

Mycotrophic Plants

We have at least two varieties of plants that don't depend on chlorophyll in our woods. These are called mycotrophic plants (because they are symbiotic with a type of fungus) and the Forest Service has a section on their wildflower website about them. The plants we have are Indian Pipe (monotropa uniflora) and Cancer Root (conopholis americana). Cancer Root is almost finished flowering and Indian Pipe is just beginning.

     This is a large cluster of Indian Pipe that has just emerged so there are specks of soil on the normally all-white plants. Another name for this is Corpse Plant.
   
  Cancer Root pops up in late spring, generally in clusters, standing about 6 inches tall. The yellowish "berries" make this plant easy to identify.
   
  The plant is short-lived and begins to turn brown and wither. We've seen plants torn up that have been munched by something so at least one critter finds them edible.

More soon!

Comments

Posted 24 June 2010

RUSLE2

West Virginia's Office of Oil and Gas is in the process of revising and updating its 1992 Erosion and Sediment Control Field Manual which covers Best Management Practices (BMPs) for access road and well site construction. The revision is much needed and we hope industry follows it better than it did the old manual.

The BMPs are necessary for important reasons. The EPA gave the oil and gas industry an exemption from Clean Water Act rules covering stormwater discharges. Why the industry needs this exemption when every other construction industry (except mining) is covered by these regulations is beyond us. The EPA was forced to abandon part of this exemption in a strongly worded Ninth Circuit Court's decision against the EPA. The EPA has a page devoted to the NPDES requirements of oil and gas.

These regulations are important because the issue isn't just sediment poisoning streams and lakes, but also because of contaminated runoff from well sites. What types of contamination? Heavy metals, organics and other chemicals used in drilling and fracturing or produced by the equipment on the site. This is why bulk chemical storage on well sites during drilling and fracturing is a huge issue. There should be no possibility of chemicals contacting the ground or water during storage or by accidental spills.

Two publications that give an idea of these impacts are related to natural gas drilling within the city limits of Denton, Texas. Kenneth Banks and David Watchal carried out a study sponsored by the EPA which examined the effects of drilling: Demonstrating the Impacts of Oil and Gas Exploration on Water Quality and How to Minimize These Impacts Through Targeted Monitoring Activities and Local Ordinances. David Watchal's doctoral dissertation, Characterizing Storm Water Runoff from Natural Gas Well Sites in Denton County, Texas, is made up of 4 papers on the issue. The first paper discusses chemicals found in stormwater runoff from gas well pads.

Industry, in an attempt to forestall regulation, has recently created a handbook, Reasonable and Prudent Practices for Stabilization (RAPPS) of Oil and Gas Construction Sites or RAPPS (download link is on this American Petroleum Institute web page). I had been familiar with the 2004 version but was unaware until recently of the expanded and updated version released by the API and other industry associations in 2009.

The newest RAPPS depends heavily on the research by Watchal and Banks and especially on Watchal's work with RUSLE2 modeling program. The RAPPS manual creators used RUSLE2 (in a special construction version not available yet publicly which has sediment control devices not available in the standard RUSLE2 program) to create specific BMPs for management and control of sediment at oil and gas sites.

RUSLE2 was created by the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, and the University of Tennessee. The version I've been using I downloaded (it's free to the public) from the USDA ARS website. Database specifics for West Virginia soils and climate were downloaded from the NRCS website for RUSLE2.

The program allows me to model soil loss based on a suite of activities. Because of a the size of a well site and the soils here, the losses are measured in many tons per acre per year. Techniques to control and manage the soil loss are able to be modeled, such as silt fences or straw mulch, to gauge the best method to control sedimentation.

Wachal's dissertation demonstrates how modeling can be used and, with few changes, this is what the creators of the new RAPPS manual did. Watchal's work was based on the construction of gas well pads in Denton where construction on sites with more than a 10% grade is not allowed by city regulation. Sites with low grades are also within the optimal range for RUSLE2. Sites with a more extreme grade create situations which RUSLE2 isn't able to model or the techniques/controls aren't available (at least on the public version I've been using). The RAPPS manual is best suited for these low grade slope situations.

RUSLE2 isn't hard to learn, but the program isn't intuitive, and user manuals are opaque. Training is usually hands-on in several-day seminars which I'm not able to take advantage of. It takes time to learn the soil science terminology and I'm thankful that RUSLE2 does all the math.

The three major inputs are location by county, soil type, and slope length and grade. The NRCS has specific county climate data and soils for download at the NRCS RUSLE2 site. The NRCS also has downloadable county soil maps and handbooks.

Starting out, I used a generic Kanawha County (Charleston area) climate location in an OSM folder in the original RUSLE2 program download (RUSLE2 is also used by the Office of Surface Mining), and inputted a generic clay loam soil with a K of 0.35 (one of the default figures used by the creators of the new RAPPS). Actually, where we live on the ridge the soil type is Gilpin/Upshur with a Gilpin horizon (brown clay with a K of 0.32) and Upshur horizon (red clay with a K of 0.43). The higher the K value, the more erosive the soil is. As I've been learning the program I've been using more specific climate and soil data.

Here is a road segment profile screen shot from the program. The segment has two grade components (350 feet at 20% grade, and 50 feet at 9% grade) in our area with Upshur soil (K=0.43). The total sediment for this length is 310 tons per acre per year from a bare bulldozed surface.

We believe roads should have a cleared width of between 25 to 30 feet. For this length that makes 0.27 acre in size, or 84 tons of soil lost from graded surface. Well operators like to "daylight" roads to 50 or 60 feet width, believing that cutting back all the trees helps keep the road dry (meaning operators can be sloppy in drainage control). Daylighting is effective only minimally and not at all when the soil is cool. A 60 foot cleared road width would mean 164 tons per year lost for this road section. By being more reasonable in site clearing practices operators could cut the soil loss in half. The goal is under 5 tons per acre per year soil loss and could generally be achieved by use of mulch, gravel road surface, immediate reseeding, and sediment management devices like silt fences.

Here is a worksheet screen shot detail for the same segment. Worksheets allow multiple management plans to be examined side by side. For this worksheet the first row is for a bulldozed surface. The average upslope erosion figure in the right-hand column is sediment loss and is 310 tons per acre per year. The second row is a graded surface covered with straw mulch at two tons per acre and with three silt fences. The sediment loss is a tenth of what it would be without any controls. The third row is a graded surface with mulch, temporary and then permanent seeding with 3 silt fences. The vegetated surface has a profound effect in limiting soil loss.

This same segment could also be a hillside where a well pad would be cut in. If the width of the disturbed surface were 300 feet for the cut, then the disturbed area is 2.75 acres. Roads because of their length and width and well pads because of the large area of surface disturbance on hillsides can create a huge soil loss. Sites we've seen have not had mulch or seeding until after the well is completed, sometimes more than a year later. The reports we've heard of huge amounts of sediment entering ponds, streams and rivers are not at all exaggerated.

More about RUSLE2 later. I've just received a copy of a special construction version not available to the public as yet.

Comments

Posted 15 June 2010

Gasland

Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air had extensive interviews with Josh Fox, the film maker of Gasland, a documentary to be shown on HBO (June 21st), and with Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica, on June 10th. We highly recommend both interviews and both can be heard on the NPR website.

Josh Fox described the making of Gasland and what he saw as he investigated the impacts of natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. This page on the NPR website has a link to hear the interview plus there are clips from the documentary and background information.

The interview with Abrahm Lustgarten was equally revealing. His articles for ProPublica have focused on fracturing and problems with industry disclosure about the chemicals being used and their effects on drinking water. In this Fresh Air interview, Lustgarten talks about the oil and gas industry's exemption from the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, partially based on industry's promise not to use diesel fuel for fracturing any more. Of course, diesel has been used for fracturing since the 2005 exemption, along with a host of other toxic chemicals. This page on the NPR website has a link to hear the interview plus there's background information.

Comments

Posted 15 June 2010

Kitten Movie

Grey and Blondie are well past their third week birthday and the changes since we saw them first on May 21st are amazing. Their eyes are open and ears are erect. They are walking (though a bit unsteadily still) and they've begun bathing themselves after a session with the bottle. We've begun the process of weaning them but Grey and Blondie are so excited they tend to skate across the saucer of food more than eat it.

We've seen the third kitten; the momma cat had moved it to under a workbench shelf in the shop. We checked again today and the kitten is no longer there and we think it's been moved to the woods.

When I get a chance I'll create a page on our website with kitten photos in the Cats section. Until then, here's a short movie of Grey made on May 30th (2.2 MB).

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