 John completed his geology degrees at UND and then after college he moved to Rome, Georgia where he taught geology environmental classes at the college and moved back to Minnesota where he worked on some mineral exploration and mine reclamation for the Minnesota DNR. And since then he's been working in consulting on large reclamation or median projects in Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina. About 10 years ago he moved to North Dakota working on oil and gas, brine spill cleanups in the Williston basin. He's currently the office manager and principal consultant for TerraCon in West Fargo, North Dakota and is the office project director for site investigation, remediation and site closures. And then also we have, I think they're doing a split presentation here today. So we also have Hillary Clifton and so Hillary is an environmental department manager for TerraCon's North Dakota offices over the last with 11 years experience environmental consulting. Her responsibilities include project planning, scope development, implementation project oversight, safety, project quality, report preparation, client relations. She spearheads project communications related to site and timely completion. And her experiences include due diligence, widespread contamination, delineation, soil and groundwater remediation. Regulatory materials identification include asbestos and lead containing paint and industrial hygiene. I think they're going to be talking about some brine, brine spills today or sprine and contaminated soil. I will turn it over to you guys. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. We're going to walk you through some research that we did related to remedying brine contamination and how we apply it both in the laboratory on test pilots and on broad scale contamination and remediation projects. And if we have time at the end, we'll run through a few of our bigger project examples. So John's going to start you off. Thanks, Hillary. So brine contamination happens a lot of ways. Can have a pipeline or gathering line leak, illegal dumping, old contamination due to evaporation ponds, maybe a cap that didn't quite go right or just a lot of other other ways that can get in the soil. And you can see it has pretty tough effect on the vegetation. One of the main techniques used to deal with brine contamination has been digging hall. You go in there, scoop it out, take it away, bring it to a landfill, come back, put new soil on and away you go. It's extremely expensive technique. It works well, but we kind of did more research on how to keep that soil on site through remediation and reclamation of the existing topsoil. When you go to a site, it's pretty obvious vegetation distressed in an area and sometimes just making the soils completely infertile. A lot of these original brine evaporation ponds were back in the 60s, so it's 60, 70 years of no growth on these sites. One of the things we do when we get out to a site is do an evaluation, surface evaluation, about every 20 feet. We do this grid pattern. Come in, do drilling, which are the blue dots. So the grid pattern consists of taking our EC meter, getting surface one and two foot readings. Then we grab chloride samples with that. And then we also do drilling. So we have drill rig go down, drilling ore from five to 25 feet, kind of defining the horizontal and vertical extent of that contamination. From that, we kind of come up with a map of highly contaminated areas, and the evaluations can take anywhere from five, 10,000 to even 30 up to 50,000 if there's a lot of drilling. So at the end of it, what we see is probably what we could have seen with the vegetation that was disturbed at the surface. So another way we do it, and probably a lot faster way and more accurate, because we are trying to get this back into nice vegetation. Go out to a site, do the drone photography. And then what we've seen from doing nearly 100 of these sites is certain vegetation grows on certain EC soils or vice versa. Certain EC soils allow certain vegetation to grow on it. So we can look at a stand of our community of this example here, Western wheatgrass, pretty much everywhere in here. We stick our probe in there. We get an EC value of 3,500 plus or minus a little bit. Same thing, foxtail you put into this stuff. It's almost always right at that 4,000 mark. Different types of vegetation. We see this one typically at 7,800 to 8,300. So instead of going in there and doing a grid pattern, which sometimes you can even miss these stands. We map the vegetation. Again, everywhere in here is about 3,500. This type of vegetation is typically in that 6,800 range. And then where it gets pretty sparse. Oops. Jump in there. Then where it gets pretty sparse, it's between the nine and 10,000 range when you have primarily white soil around that contaminated with just a few of these. Again, you're getting in the nine, 10,000 range. So using vegetation to kind of map what it is. And yes, it depends on the root systems. A little bit on the soil type moisture, a lot of that stuff. But in general, you can look at the vegetation, you know, pretty much right, right where it's at. So from that, we can take and take a drawing footage, map the vegetation types, assign values to that goal and kind of get, get readings from everywhere within that. So you can get a lot more representation, a better representation of the area with a lot quicker, just in an afternoon or a half day out there. And again, the ultimate goal is to get vegetation that's 20, 30,000 EC back into production, you know, make it green, get it back into grassland, cropland, et cetera. We took a bunch of soils that were this type of soil, nothing growing on it for about 60 years, brought it back to lab. And again, the plan was to get it all looking like this. So that's the ultimate goal of our project. Through all these projects we've done over the years, we saw that EC is probably the best correlation to vegetation growth, do a lot of lab work, spend a lot of money on labs, but we found out that EC is probably the most directly correlated to the results of vegetation. So we came back in the lab, made these cells to try different remediation techniques with different amendments. I think we had 158 cells, eight different types of amendments, different vegetation, three primary contaminated soils, 6,000, 10,000, about 18,000 EC soils, went through, did different waterings, different moisture levels, took EC levels as we went, monitored those values, big picture. All of our techniques reduced the EC values with normal annual precipitation. If we pushed a little more water through there or faster, we got really big results from 15,000, 20,000 down in the below 5,000 range. So biggest thing we noticed pushing water through there helps quite a bit. Pretty much everyone same thing. Every technique worked, but when we put more water in the system, it worked faster and better. Same results across the board. So different amendments going to look here, 38% reduction, 1% 19, 22% reduction, 37, 47, 52, 41, but the best reduction we had is when we only used water, no amendments. So we were getting from our values of 15,000, 20,000 down to about 2,000, 3,000 with no amendments. And then after that point, the water didn't do a lot. That's when we added our amendments. So amendments are extremely important, but maybe not until you get down to the end. So you can put just water through the system. It cleans it up most of the way or gets down to that 2,000 value. And then there on, we really couldn't get it below 2,000 without the amendment. So it becomes very important towards the end. From there, we tried vegetation. Pretty not great results. Little surprise here and there. A few things worked. Had some scraggly looking stuff coming up, but all in all, just the amendments with normal water. Again, we had reductions, but not great reductions. Our germination rates for barley was the highest at 52, canola 38, sunflowers in the 30s, alfalfa 28, and then soybeans at 22. So all in all, if you have marginal EC values out in the field, you're going to have a lot more luck with barley, for example, than planting soybeans. All 158 amended soils put together. I'm just kind of lumping the data. Everything below 2,000, we had 100% germination. So we did five types of five. So 25 seeds in each of those cells. And we had 100% germination with anything below 2,000. The state to clean up standard is EC of 2,000. So I feel the states done a good job defining that. And then three to 4,000, we get about 70% germination. So still can work pretty good, but example again, this is everything. So barley was at 83% at 4,000. And then the soybeans was closer to 50. So that's just kind of a lump sum slide on that. Reductions again, just with the, whoops. Reductions again with just the normal rainfall. I stated earlier, but again, no amendments, a 54% reduction pushed a year of water through there in a couple of weeks. We had about 80% reduction. So starting with soils at 5,000 EC, 12,000 and 18,000. At 5,000 again, we had about a 60, 65% reduction across the board. So getting those soils right down to 2,000 mark, the 12,000 soils, 80, 85% reduction again, getting the soils to about 2,000. And when we started with 18,000 highly contaminated stuff, again, reduction is about 90% getting them down to 2,000. And then again, that's where the amendments really kicked in and did the work and the chemistry and breaking ions and breaking the clays up. After pushing the water through again, the initial blue germination, after we pushed the water, a year of water through, we had 100% germination, all 158 cells. So pushing water through is obviously most important thing. And then again, the amendments worked more towards the end of the process. Again, kind of picture worth a thousand words. We had 100% germination, all 158 cells, all five plants that we planted in there and everything looked pretty good. So that was kind of how we cleaned one foot. So how do we clean three feet of soil? We developed these columns. How long did it take to clean these soils? Again, you had contaminated soil. We put a capillary break in there. And then three feet of amended soil, pushed the water through. And again, it was about one annual cycle that we could push through there in just a matter of weeks. So kind of took that to a bigger scale. And now that we know pushing water works, we tried that in several methods. This is kind of the plan. And this is how they turned out in the end, all in all, all the methods seem to work pretty good. And I'll go through those pretty quickly, but we put these in in November. And just after spring melt, we already saw results. So going from 30, 40,000 EC down to about the 8,000 range before we started our planting. So just one spring melt, we got probably 60 to 70% of the way there. And the same thing, pretty much every cell that we did, did our plantings had good success. We had a good success planting, but we had a moose out on site that ate all our plants. So that was a little challenge, but we were mainly looking at, can they grow? Can they start from there? We'll let the farmers and ranchers take over. So all in all, just great results, all the methods, everything worked, all the crops worked. So quickly, phyto-remiation cell, this one all we did was basically dig a foot, foot and a half out, hit kind of the groundwater in the area, put in cattails in there and it flourished. And again, this is kind of the five-year picture, but we put the bulbs in, just shaking them, getting the seeds out there. No matter how it worked, it worked good, had good success with that, and then you can use those for phyto-remiation to remove the salt from the project. This technique was used for decades, take three feet out, put three feet of clean back in there. But what happens is you have recontamination, you have wicking and recontamination of this soil. So we just did that, we had good green the first year and after five years you can see the, it's kind of taken it back over recontaminating. Just kind of wanted to test that. So what we did is we put in this capillary break and gravel layer, same thing, put it in there. And again, even after five years, not only did it clean that area, but starting to clean up the area around that. We did mixing of soils. We had soil that was 10,000 E.C., soil that was 2,000 E.C., mixed them together. Again, in the middle there in the 7,000 range, 6,000 range. And then without the capillary break, we had just didn't clean up recontamination. Same thing with the capillary break. Again, it cleaned up and it continued to clean up the area actually around our cell as well. This one was amended soils. So we push the soils to the side, put the capillary break in, push the material back in, push the top soil back in. Again, that one annual precip cleaned it up pretty nice. And again, this is five years later, everything's looking good. Same thing with this one, we just didn't wait the year. We put little berms around there, push the water through and just cleaned it up in a couple of weeks. This one was kind of homogenation of soils. It's the one down here, a little hard to see. But in the middle, it was E.C., the 30,000, 7,000, 8,000 on this side and then clean here. So we just mixed them together, put it back down with our capillary break. And again, one year, it looked great. And this is the five year picture. One of the things they wanted us to try out here also is, you know, why take this out, haul it, bring new soil back in, just put the capillary break right on top of the contaminated soil. Have a hilltop over here, push the material down and get that back into production right away. So nothing's hauled off site. Nothing goes in the landfills. A lot cheaper method, getting that land back in production immediately. Same thing, just with the juice, synthetic drainage layer. Again, worked great five years later. Again, just everything's green and looking good. Just the construction of one of those phyto-remiation cells that were lined. So again, taking soil like this, getting it back in here after year one and then after five years, you can see it usually cleans up the area and the areas around it was kind of interesting. And then as a side note, the original soil, after a year, after five years, you can see anywhere we put that tile in there. Like this X right here, it blew up a little bit. Vegetation is growing. There's no tile here. There's tile here. You can see vegetation growing between. And then from out here, started off as a six inches, a foot, two foot, five feet and about eight feet after five years, just with tiling and no watering. So kind of accidentally tried tiling out there and it worked pretty good and we're doing a full scale. One of those this spring as well at a property. So kind of in summary of the research we did, all the amendments work, but they work better towards the end of the process so you can add them late in the process. Adding water to the system cleaned it up fast. Got all 150 of our soils back at 100% germination. Very important to put the capillary break in there so you don't recontaminate the soil. And again, just kind of worked good for grassland vegetation. Everything we put into that. Take over dealers. So now that we had all this great data and proven methods, we're taking it out into the field and we're implementing it on large scale remediation projects. Our response to spills, whether they're active or historic, is generally the same. The biggest difference is the timeline. We're usually, when you're responding to active spills, it's usually an emergency situation. We need to get out there. We need to stop this bill. We need to contact the parties involved and we need to start mitigating any further spread of either surface contamination or subsurface contamination. We had a situation last summer out near Tayoga, North Dakota, it was a subsurface line leak that had gone on notice for a while and it was starting to come to the surface and spread over the surface. So we mobilized to the site, did some emergency burbings, stopped the leak and then got to work evaluating how we were going to remediate this. Where's my button? So the broken line was down in this area of the release and you can see that it impacted vegetation way up here to the Northwest. So once we stopped the leak and started excavating those saturated soils out and hauling them off site, we used the vegetation to guide our evaluation of the impacts. We worked through those same methods that John described where we evaluate the surface and then add depth, guide our excavation, get a better understanding of the magnitude of the release and then figure out what remedial technique is going to be the most effective. When we have a compressed timeline and the priority is to clean up the site, sometimes dig and haul still is the best method to use. And that's what we ended up doing in this site. We removed the contamination, we installed that capillary break, put clean fill back in. We ran into frozen conditions towards the end of our backfill so we elected to let it go through one full freeze-thaw cycle so it can settle. We'll bring it back up to great topsoil and seed in the spring. When we were putting these slides together, John said, why are you putting a black and white picture in here? Why don't you find something with color? And I said, well, that's just North Dakota in November. That is a color photo. Sorry about that. With our historic spills, we have a lot more time on the front end. They're generally in a stable condition. There's not an active source. There generally aren't a lot of sensitive receptors out in the middle of nowhere where we address these. So we can go out and do our full evaluation. You've seen this diagram before. We collect our data and then oftentimes we'll propose multiple remediation methods and determine which one is going to be the best for addressing the contamination at the site and the proposed future use of that land. So this actually, this method, we've implemented both in agricultural and grassland applications and have seen success in both of them. We were able to pilot test this on a large scale at a site near Glenburn, North Dakota. You can see this farmer was having a lot of issues getting anything to grow in this area. So we did our data collection at the surface and at depth. We proposed remedial methods. They elected to design the tiling system with the capillary break. We showed up to do construction and the landowner said, oh, geez, you know, I don't think it's going to work for me to have this fight over mediation cell up here. Could you put it over here instead? He said, sure, we could do that. So sort of on the fly, we reoriented the whole system to drain to the Northwest instead of to the North. Went through, installed it, put that contamination back in place, augmented precipitation. So we flooded the site. It drained into that fight over mediation cell and we monitored it for several years and now it's back into production. So we were monitoring, we were keeping an eye on this area to the Northeast. It wasn't included in the initial remediation plan because it was sort of moderately contaminated. We decided to focus on the most significantly contaminated portion of that property. And it was still struggling. So last summer we went out, we collected initial data. We figured out where the problems were in this area and did a targeted excavation here. It looks a lot like by the slight ear, which was kind of fun to look at over the course of the summer. So we took out what was left of the problem areas up here. We'll monitor it for the next couple of growing seasons, but the farmer will be able to plant in there this season. We have a couple other examples of cleanups we've done. This is another example of where Dign Hall sometimes is applicable. This historic pad was on the cut bank side of this river and it was getting precariously close to eroding into that. So we went in, reclaimed that pad, reestablished vegetation. Here's some photos from construction. We monitor the vegetation for several growing seasons to make sure that it's doing well before we get the sign off on those. We've also gone back and resealed boreholes from old exploration. Sometimes they were sealed improperly. Sometimes they weren't sealed at all and water would start flowing and flooding areas. And as soon as those were cleaned up, the land dried up and farmers were able to put those back into production. We've done a lot of recapping of historic sites in order to reestablish vegetation. And we've, this, this was another challenging one. This was some illegal dumping. Off the side of the road that traveled about a half a mile downhill. And we had some real erosion control challenges with this area because there's a lot of erosion. That was here during heavy rain events and in the middle of our remedial construction, a lot of water ran through here during a heavy rain event. And so everything that had been repaired got washed out and had to be brought back in. And the vegetation really struggled. So last summer we went in, we installed some more erosion control measures. We ended up reseeding this area and we'll keep an eye on that as well to make sure it actually gets a chance to establish. Hopefully before any additional rain events. And then this is the reclaim we did of the test plots that we installed back in 2018. The farmer called and very politely asked if we had gotten all the information we needed and we said yes. So we went in and we installed the tiling with the capillary break in this site as well. Excuse me. We ran into freezing conditions here in November as well. And I was really hoping mother nature was going to help us out and dump a whole boatload of snow on this this winter. So we get a good spring flush and then we could do a little additional flooding. But it seems like we're probably going to have to do a lot of additional flooding in the spring unless someone schedules a snowstorm up in Renville. And the farmer will be able to plant this this spring as well. Any questions? Sure. So I'll say you guys looked at was sodium an issue. No, we primarily the first round of labs we did. We tested for everything. And after we started looking at what vegetation kind of came up on what we just decided to primarily look at the EC and chlorides is that's the way you saw all the correlation. So in the beginning, yes, it was a big issue. It was there, but it worked out in the end. And then we looked at our very end labs. Pretty much everything went down. It's just the EC was what we kind of leaned on because that's what correlated the best to the, the vegetation growth. If you ever had an area with high sodium, would you have to do anything different? Yeah. And the amendments is like each site you got to look at, we always do the initial labs. And then from those eight techniques that we used, we kind of look at the different like with the sodium, you know, sometimes you put lime in there. Sometimes you put, you know, limestone sometimes you just got to increase the permeability. So yes, with the, you always have to do the initial lab work to see which technique you're going to use. It's just, we saw even without doing the lab work, you can get from that really high number to a, you know, that borderline number with just water. And then the amendments really kick in. So we do labs at the beginning after we flood it to see which amendment you'd put in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The EC is just off our EC probe. The chlorides is a one-to-one. We do, you know, half water or half soil, half water. Yeah. Stick in the probe in the ground. And then each soil site, we have a correlation. So sometimes out in the field in our site investigation, the EC values, we'll say all 4,000. And we get the labs back. It's actually 2,000. So we have that correlation at each site. So then if you're doing removal of soil, that's kind of the correlation used. So when you get down to that level, you send them back to the lab, generally you're right on. So yeah, it's never actually that you got to do the correlation. For the water flooding, what was, what was great is using rainwater, but the sites that are out on the open, but for the lab sample, what did you use for the water? Was it tap water? Yeah. It was tap water. And it had an EC value about 700, just the tap water. Fargo tap water had EC of 700. So that varies at each site as well. At some of these sites, we've used rural water. We just have to use it in the middle of the night or we'll fill the tank in the middle of the night and then use it during the day. But yeah, you got to keep an eye on that. And at this site, we were going to put a well at the contaminated site, but the EC values of the water were, you know, in the four or 5,000 range. So we had to go through a water. Thank you very much. So with respect to that area of Wendell, there's a lot of natural salinity in areas as well. What were your, how did you do your best to differentiate the natural versus the legacy of water? Yeah, and that's, that's kind of where the chlorides come in. Um, generally, you know, with the natural alkaline soils, they're, they seem to always be at that 75 to 8,500 range. So when you start seeing that you test the chlorides, the chlorides are, you know, non-detect or a hundred or somewhere in that. So where you have the produced water, Brian water, your chloride values will be, you know, in the thousands, two, three thousands when you're in that, that 7,000 range. So primary chlorides is where we knock those out.