 This is a very short presentation on how Cattail Harvesting might be a useful tool in your toolbox for remediating some brine water. And as a classic state employee, I did none of this work. So Brian Conner, Andy Brent, Wes, and Austin did all the heavy lifting. In fact, they put most of the pitchers together. This is kind of a quick update on what brine is. That's some brine from the former butte field. Sodium chloride is missable to between 120 and 150 milligrams per year. That's about 225,000. According to UND, under page on brine, the average collection line or what you're getting out of the ground for oil production is about 18 barrels of brine for one barrel of crude. Brine, the big issue with brine is it impairs the ability of plants to uptake water and it's kind of a stair length in the end. It's pretty tough on amphibians and then high enough concentrations, it'll kill some mammals. Fish really have a hard time with it in high concentrations. And brine, this is a pipeline spill. And so brine is the hardest stuff to deal with. That dark stuff on top, that's the crude, that's pretty easy to deal with. You can, we dug out, it was dug out where the spill was at or where the release was and then the surface stuff was burnt off. They put a nice big dike in, they're gonna catch all the brine that had cotton out of there, all the salt water that came out of it. But it's kind of a slippery critter and it crawled all the way down the hill and killed all kinds of stuff. Brine's really a difficult creature to deal with. It's persistent. This is some land where it's the older 1970s type pits were around. And so it's still sterile. Well, let's say 1980 at the very latest, so 34 years later. The classic way of dealing with the spills is the dig and dump. It works okay. It's quick, it's dirty. Everybody's happy after it's over with, but it's got some downsides. What do you do with the soil when you're done, what you have to get rid of? The soil you put back might not be appropriate as far as the seed bank. It's expensive. And it doesn't always capture the brine. In situ, remediation and impacted soils and in earth, a lot of times they'll be treated with some kind of gypsum or some kind of biologic or some imaginary magical pixie dust. We actually had a company that came in and they had some special stuff they could sprinkle on the brine spill. And it would turn it into harmless carbon. And I told them why they stop at carbon. We could go for gold, couldn't we? But they didn't quite get that. And then you can either replant with natives. The classic is that or to with some salt tolerant plants and do sort of a transitional period, just getting some cover on there. Had some oats on the right and this is the forest service mix on the left. There's other in situ stuff that we do. I'm not gonna pretend that I know anything about electro-connected remediation, but I thought the picture was nice. It seems to have worked pretty well. And to me, this is as magic as that pixie dust. And I kind of like the idea of in situ treatment if at all possible. I think it takes longer, it causes headaches, it's not always successful. And you need a regulator that's going to be open to the ideas to impatient. And be able to be a bit of a buffer between other people who want things to be done more quickly. The pros to it is it keeps the original earth and oil structure. There's less biological disruption. And really, this is the cutting edge of the science today. This is where it's at to figure out some ways to get to these things without digging up the entire earth. And then the long run, I think it will be cheaper. So we're just gonna take a real quick look at a brine spill by the Canadian border. I'm not trying to pick on anybody. This is a rival 22 injection line spill, was reported on August 4th in 2014, and they lost 1,400 barrels. We're not really looking at the spill, but what happens here at this spill and just the processes that they went through. And they responded real quickly. They shut the line in, they plugged the culverts, you'll take a look to utilities. And they began to recover right away with dominated, dominated remedial action is going to be to pump. They sampled the bejeebers out of this thing. But as you can see, so when we looked at that bottle of a brine water there at 225,000, there was a fair amount out of it. And 125,000 to 150,000 is your miscible level. Surface waters here were 63,000 on the south side of that dish. Kind of give you an idea of just how rich that was and what contribution in that wetland was probably from that pipeline break and not naturally occurring in that water. So they did a bunch of different things to get started. They were really responsive, I'm happy with them. They thought kind of out of the box. I kept telling them I wanted them to dig, I wanted them to dig. As a regulator, I want it over with because I want to get on to my next site. I don't want to spend the rest of my life on this thing, I want it over with. And West Bell and Tetra Tech kept telling me, take a deep breath. We got things we can do here. And so they looked at the different stratifications of water concentrations of the salts within the water. And this is a manifold they built and they stuck it in on the south side, where they could then take the heavier water off the bottom of that ditch and leaving some of that fresh water on top when they were pumping. I thought it was a pretty clever idea and it actually worked really well. But that's not what we're talking about today, we're talking about cattails. And then I thought I would include this picture because everybody loves to be in water digging in mud. I just, I liked the picture and I thought, hey, they actually, they work really hard. I'm impressed by them, but really what it's about is see those salt stress cattails. And if you see behind there, the cattails are healthy. This is a spill spot. So all in all, this is what we were looking at. So we had, they put a water barrier, not really all that therapy successful. And then the north wetland is 30 acres in the south wetland, about 60 acres. You can see where the spill is there and then that's where that manifold sits. And so these are the type of concentrations that we were looking at in the soil at the time. And as you can see, some of them are quite high. This is soil and they made a nice map of this. They did the EM survey as well, but some of the soil concentrations were up to 24,000. And that's a fair amount of chloride in that soil. And again, I was telling the Steg, we've got to dig this baby up. So this is what it looked like and it didn't look good. There are certain species of birds that really like salt water, like brine waters. And even though this is normally fresh water, Pond thought that this was great. So we had American album sets and Blackneck Stilts. And I don't know how many of you people have seen those, but they decided they would take up residence there and take advantage of the additional sodium chloride and the macroinvertebrates that responded to the increased salt. So this is the small piece of worth with this. Now we're going to get to the stuff that's of value. So in April of 2015, they collected cattails. And area five is outside of the major impact area, same with three. And then one and two are on the north side and minus five is on the south side. And as you can see, the chlorides within the cattail material, within the vegetation itself, was up to a magnitude higher in chloride and the stuff outside of there. And there's an interesting piece to this. This is the 2015 and it's in those bombed out cattails. And you'll see that the above is the above vegetation. The below vegetation is the root vegetation. And in this bombed out stuff, you'll see that the roots had higher concentrations of chlorides in them than the above vegetation. And remember early on, I mentioned that the thing with the salt water is it prevents the uptake of nutrients and those types of things. So they harvested that first bit of this is the first bit of harvesting they did for cattails in 2015. They took approximately 1,400 square feet. This would if you go back now to area one and two, it's all on the north side. And this is where they took it out of that area one and area two. You know, whenever I do any of the clam things that always look so messy, but you know, really, this is a pretty nice little wetland. We'll see some other pictures of it. And so then in 2016, they removed quite a bit more cattails. They removed approximately 240,000 square feet. And that's what that looked like. We'll get to some data here in a minute. So here's 2021. There's a gap in the middle here that cattail harvesting didn't occur. And then my next presentation is going to be on chaos and explain why that doesn't happen. But here's some, this is some data now to go along with this. We've taken out the controls, but we're just going to look at, they did take data on cattails in 2015, 17, 18, 19, and 21. And you can see that there's a change from the above and below. So in 2017 and 18, 19, and 21, we had lots of regrowth in the cattail population. So this is typhilatifolia. This is the standard unhybridized natural occurring cattail in North Dakota. And they're really pretty tolerant of chlorides, you can see here because they're, but the big difference is when it was all bombed out in the beginning and concentrations were very high, most of the chlorides within the cattails were contained below the surface, in other words, in that root zone. And in afterwards, once it started revitalizing and regrowing, you'll see that the highest concentrations of chlorides are in the surface. And this is significant. So if you're going to use this as a tool, that little Phillips screwdriver in your toolbox, you can take the top and leave the bottom alone and still and get a good amount of chloride out of that system by doing that. So just kind of put it all in perspective. There was a whole 4.4 pounds of chlorides removed in 2015. That's a lot of work for just four pounds of chlorides because, you know, they probably get in the bag about like that. But in 2016, 272 pounds and in 2020, 180 pounds. It doesn't sound like much, but look at what we're looking at here. The value of this is I can leave the world in one place and I can still start winning the battle. And so these are some of the concentrations throughout time. So you'll see the chloride concentrations here are from 2014 to 2018. And what I wanted to show here was that with this is how high those concentrations are within the soils. So if you go to this, I'm probably going to turn this thing off somehow. Well, that didn't work, did it? Yeah, I did. There we go. There we go. So this is where they were removing the cattails. So even in 2018, the chloride concentrations are 2,900, 2,100. These are really fairly high numbers for over 36,000 there. And yet they've got pretty good, I'm going to get to a picture here. We've got pretty good cattail growth on it at that time. So these, the cattails are pretty tough. You know, they can, they've got the ability to be your tool to suck some of that chloride out of the soil. Now we'll go back, but to put it in perspective, you know, it's not, it's not a panacea. It's not like this big epiphany that's going to work for you. The heavy lifting was done through the pumping. From 2014 to 2018, they removed, you know, 22,220,000 barrels of water out of those wetlands. And there's kind of a real quick and dirty calculation on how much chloride that is, that'd be 83 tons of chloride. If you back calculate that back to the 1,500 barrels, you could maybe find some discrepancy there. So again, so this is kind of the chaos part of the things. We're able to remove cattails in 15 and in 16. And then nothing happens in between there. And again, now in 21. And then we're going to do it in 22. And the local landowner burnt it. So there were no cattails to harvest. And again, so nothing is perfect. So this looks really good in 2017. And this is why they were harvesting the cattails. And there's kind of a break where they don't harvest any cattails. And you'll see here that you can definitely see that there's one spot within this wetland that has a little bit more alkaline or that type of soil within it. And you walk out there, it's very sodic. And it shows well in the EM survey. So the EM survey here is in the beginning. I think it's 2014 or 15. And then this one here is 2019. And this hotspot kind of area is a bit migrated. And it matches exactly where that's at. So it's pretty accurate. Anyway, so I'm not sure what the plans are in the future where these things get reviewed annually. But I think that, like I said, I think the important take home here is that in-situ is a way to go. We can get quite a bit of chloride up into this vegetation. Aggressively use of vegetation harvesting, I believe, is a useful tool within an entire toolbox. Not necessarily a cure, but it's something that would be useful for remediation in the future. And that's a little better picture of the manifold that they stuck in the ditch. Any questions? When they harvest the cattle, wouldn't they be with them? They dispose of them in a landfill. But I'm not sure what is necessary. I'm not positive. That would be something that we could look at to see if there'd be a better way to do that. On the year that the landowner burned, did all those quarries basically just go back into the water? Yeah, they don't go anywhere. What a bigger gap out of that. Do you know what your sense is actually going to do with what they have in the mollusk that the minimum pool of health file that? Well, since I wasn't there. And so like I said, I don't know what exactly. I believe they cut these after it was froze. So it would be fairly simple to do. And that's from a biological perspective, dealing with vegetation. You can drown cattails. So it's actually a pretty useful tool for it. If you can draw down, cut off cattails, and fill them up, you can drown them out. So if you're trying to maintain a healthy cattail population, you want to make sure you cut them high enough that they're not drowned when spring rolls around.