Another Spill at a Local Gas Well Storage Tank

Gas Well Study
June 6, 2023

Natural gas wells, besides the natural gas they produce, create pollution. The most common pollution is errant and deliberate methane emissions. Just about every well we’ve looked at had a minor leak of some sorts. Sometimes the leak is audible from a distance as a hissing sound. Gas wells with storage tanks have vents to the atmosphere for methane and other gases. Some gas wells like this one have regular sizeable emissions as part of the plunger lift process for removing fluid from the deepest part of the production casing.

The other type of pollution is created by the fluid brought, along with the natural gas, from underground formations. This fluid can be brine (one local well had brine with a salt concentration comparable to 4 pounds of table salt per gallon of water, see this permit page 7), can be petroleum (usually oil, some wells can produce a low octane gasoline), or a mixture of the two. This fluid is kept in storage tanks at the well site. The fluid is removed by a vac truck that sucks the fluid out of a tank. The brine is disposed of by underground injection in special class 2 wells. The oil is saved and sold. It costs money to dispose of brine so it easy to see how some natural gas producers are willing to fudge a bit, leaving a valve open on a vac truck leaking brine as the truck goes from well to well emptying tanks.

The well where this spill from a tank happened has had previous spills. The well is in Kanawha county and we have written about it in the past. We made a YouTube video about another spill here and attempts at cleanup.

State and in some cases federal regulations attempt to protect the environment with regulations regarding storage tanks. In West Virginia storage tanks need to be within secondary containment, a dike or other structure able to hold the contents of the tank in case of a catastrophic event. Since secondary containment can also hold rainwater there needs to be a mechanism or process to remove rainwater from the containment. Usually this is a pipe through the containment with a valve.

West Virginia’s regulators have been confused about the requirements of secondary containment for double wall tanks, not following federal requirements and state regulation. So it’s not uncommon to find double wall tanks in West Virginia without secondary containment even though they don’t have overfill protection and the tanks are situated within feet of a stream. At the time we examined the federal regulations they did not exempt plastic double wall storage tanks from SPCC requirements for added secondary containment.

This is the storage tank at 47-039-02026 and the stains from an overflow weeks earlier are still evident. The tank sits within an earth dike as its secondary containment. We’ve seen several problems with earth secondary containment. The walls erode over time. Deer and other animals going into the containment tend to follow a trail that ends up lowering the height of the secondary containment at that spot. At this well even though there is secondary containment, when there was a spill in the past, the fluids seeped through the base of the containment where the dike sits on the soil surface. There was no requirement for keying the dike to the soil during construction which would have prevented the fluid migrating on the heavily compacted clay soil surface through the less compacted soil used as the dike.

The fluid appears to have overflowed from the trap door at the top of the tank, though most of the discoloration also appears to come from the seam where the top joins the double wall tank. The vertical pipe is the inlet source of fluids under pressure from the well or separator vessel. There are two capped fixtures to the right of the vertical pipe and these are for extraction of the fluids.

In most cases tanks we have seen have not had their top hatches locked. The Chemical Safety Board has documented a number of cases where people have been killed or injured after climbing on top of tanks to see what the tanks hold. Emissions can be explosive. Sometimes people climb onto a tank which contains low octane gasoline or drip to use it to run farm equipment.

The vent for this tank is on top, an open T pipe circled in red. It’s possible to have the tank emissions return to the production line by adding pressure but oil and gas companies feel that the cost is prohibitive even though the bill would be paid within a few years by increased production.

This wasn’t a large spill so discoloration of the soil was limited to a foot from the edge of tank. Past spills have contaminated the soil so the salts are attractive to animals such as deer whose tracks are visible within the containment. Gas wells with their various spills create artificial salt licks for animals.

We’ve checked this well periodically over the years and this is the first time we’ve seen the secondary containment drainage pipe’s valve closed. The previous time water from a rain was dripping out. We’ve not bothered to keep records of our visits so it’s not possible to be accurate for how long the valve was always seen open; we’ll say five years.

Spring 2023

Woods

Last autumn I posted photos showing the progress of leaf color and fall. I took a similar series of photographs this spring showing the progress of trees leafing out.

This group of photos was taken near the south west corner of the house on April 11th. Sunlight reflecting from the limbs of these trees almost makes the photo look like it was taken in winter. Trees, however, have begun to bud and leaf out.

This was taken on April 15 and the difference is immediately apparent.

By April 23rd we are barely seeing the sky. Daytime in summer the yard will be in full shade and at night we might get a glimpse of the moon and a star or two.

This is what the woods looked like on April 23. It’s still early spring but already the eye can’t see as far.

The photograph was taken on May 5th. Half the hickory trees still had to leaf out. Less than a month from the first photograph in this series and our world has been transformed.

In mid-April the Mealy Bellwort flowers and I was able to take some photographs this year. The flowers are ephemeral. I’d see a plant flowering and think about taking a photograph and when I come back a couple of days later the flower is gone. The is one of several flowering alongside the ATV trail from the shed where we park the ATV to the road.

This is another growing at the base of a large red oak. The plants are edible when cooked and apparently taste like asparagus.

A large pine fell into the old garden and we decided to just leave it there rather than cutting it up and moving the logs. One of the major limbs had these pine galls on its branches. I’d seen in the past, on fallen branches, these wood-like balls. The gall is caused by a fungus and in spring the balls turn yellow as the spores are released.

Our grandson managed to break the screen and bend the frame on his iPad Mini 4 and I did a logic board swap with a non-functioning iPad with good screen and frame. This is the damaged iPad with the screen off preparing to remove the logic board. The left edge of the iPad is the bottom. The iFixit guides are a great help when taking on a project like this.

This is the non-functioning iPad with the screen off and I’ve started the process of removing the bad logic board. This is the top of the iPad with the front facing camera near the middle and the back facing camera back is in the right corner. Apple makes these devices with tiny screws of all different lengths and it’s important that the proper length screw goes into its spot.

When the swap was completed the grandson was excited to get his “computer” back.

It is now June and the massive amounts of tree pollen are pretty much finished. In August we’ll see the approach of autumn when song birds start heading south and the briars start losing their leaves.

Cutting Up a Tree

Off the Grid
January 23, 2023

Recently all the firewood I have cut has come from already fallen trees. I’m currently working in an area off the rocks road where trees were blown down late spring or early summer last year. In this case the wind was from the east, usually strong winds are from the west or north.

There are different categories of windfall for firewood. An easy tree is one on or near a road and where the ground is level. Less easy are trees which have fallen down slope so the trunk is higher than the top. Least easy to cut but easier to split than the down slope trees are those that fall along a slope. Generally splitting for those trees is on ground that can be almost level. Cutting up a tree has the challenge of keeping the bolts from rolling down the hill. A large, heavy bolt can roll quite far, sometimes too far.

The tree I’m working on fell along a slope. It’s not a steep slope, but steep enough. In this case I cut up the top and along the trunk to where the tree was supported by a small broken maple sapling.

To keep the log from rolling down the hill I used a chain wrapped around the log and a tree further up slope. I piled cut and broken branches from the fallen tree a short distance down the slope which would hopefully slow and catch an errant rolling bolt. I also used cut branches and splits from the top to wedge under the log at intervals so a wedge was there to support each cut bolt.

I had already marked the log for where the cuts would be made so sawing the log was relatively straight forward once it was no longer supported by the sapling. I cut a bolt from the uphill side until just a small section of bark was holding it to the trunk. I engaged the chain brake for the saw, put the saw down, and broke the bolt free and turned it on end or sideways so it wouldn’t roll. The brush caught two bolts that wanted to go downhill.

So the process was cut, put the saw down while the brake was on, break the bolt free, and go onto the next cut. Once everything was set up, cutting went quickly.

Toward the trunk of the tree after the bolts were cut. The broken sapling that kept the tree from rolling is in the foreground.

A photograph looking from the broken trunk of the tree toward the top in the distance. This photo gives an idea of the slope and shows the brush I placed downhill to catch rolling bolts. The light brownish area to the left is the sawdust and chips from the chainsaw cutting. All the bolts are a little downhill from where the tree originally lay.

The cut limbs from the top used as wedges are visible in this photo. The largest bolts are about 18 inches in diameter and are heavy.