First visit to the Permian

I was in Alpine last week. Local resident and Sierra Club member Lori Glover drove me around to experience what is going on. I saw and smelled, and I spoke to quite a few local residents about their experiences since the industry has moved to the area.

Here is what I saw:

 

View towards the southeast, just north of Balmorhea

This is part of the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas. What made the day, 30 Nov., somewhat special, was that we had clear skies and relatively strong, gusty winds. If you look carefully, you can see in the picture above how the sky near the horizon is milky, hazy, while it is an increasingly darker blue aloft. Folks in this area love the deep blue skies, and the clear, starry nights. Something we city folk have almost forgotten about ...

I was not surprised about the haze. Strong winds kick up dust, but because it is "heavy", it often does not travel long-distance, and usually is not carried up high in the air, so you see it mostly closer to the ground in the picture above; probably no more than about one kilometer above ground. This is what is called the mixing layer, the near-surface layer in which air is efficiently mixed during daytime.

Much of the dust in the air is usually natural because of the sparse vegetation and dry soil in this environment. However, when we got closer to the shale drilling area, just a few miles further north, it became clear that the industry likely contributes a major fraction to the dust emissions:

 

a production site pad north of Balmorhea, note dust emissions in the center right

As more and more drill sites and production pads are covering the landscape, more and more bare soil is exposed to the winds, and that undoubtedly, as shown above, enhances wind-blown dust emissions.

The dust hung around till the evening ...

 

late afternoon, looking south toward the Davis Mountains

... affecting visibility and thus the enjoyment of vistas and starry night skies. Some dust was still noticeable the following day.

Driving at night when coming to town, and leaving early in the morning to return to College Station, we came through numerous areas where one could clearly smell hydrogen sulfide, H2S. H2S is highly toxic, but fortunately we smell it before it becomes a threat to us. Since the smell, often compared to "rotten eggs", is very offensive and often leads to nausea, people typically remove themselves quickly from an area of H2S smell. How do you do that in a shale oil production area, when your home is located downwind of H2S emissons?

I have a good sense of smell. It often reminds me of my childhood, when I was able to tell what my mother had cooked for lunch even before opening our home's front door ... I therefore react sensitive to H2S and sympathize with neighbors who fall ill from offensive smells ... and we smelled H2S a lot in the Permian! At times it was plainly obvious where the smell came from when passing just downwind of road-side pad sites on our way north to Pecos, despite the strong winds dispersing the pollutant.

At night, when dispersion is typically at its minimum, the smell is carried far beyond its emission sites, staying close to the ground as the mixing layer depth shrinks to a few hundred, or less, meters. So I thought, maybe, next time a decision maker "tours" the area, ask him/her to come back around midnight, or at 6 am, and take a sniffing-tour instead ...