 Okay, thank you, Brenda, for the introduction. So as part of the program, they were looking for a salinity type case study. It turns out it's kind of hard to find one of those that might not be tied up in litigation or they don't have, or that somebody doesn't want you talking about. Fortunately, I was able to reach out to a couple of clients that I work with that were willing to let me talk about projects so long as names were excluded to protect the innocent. So, as Elise talked about for those of you that were here last night, my friend Steve did some projects that I'm gonna talk about today. And just to kind of set the stage, when we're talking about reclamation or restoration in general, in the top left, I've got a pile of marbles. We've got things of different sizes, different shapes, different colors, different textures. So that could be different plants within a plant community, different soil textures, different soil types, what have you. And sometimes in the process of reclamation or restoration, like the top right, I have black and white. Sometimes we think in this black and white, it is or it isn't. And with a disturbed system, a lot of times you throw all this in a blender and you just end up with this gray. And we have to figure out what to do with that. So, thinking about soil specifically in saline soils, we've got multiple different soil types across the United States with different soil textures, soil orders, things like that. Some that are saline and some that are not saline. Some that are saline sodic, some that are sodic. And all of that is going to kind of lead into, we need to know what we have specifically on our site that we're working with. So, a lot of people prior to me, who are a lot smarter than me, have given a lot of background information on soil salinity. But this is, so this is basically our textbook example of whether a soil is saline or not. For saline soils, we're looking at ECs greater than four, SAR less than 13 and a pH of less than 8.5. And that's kind of the basis of what I'm using as the definition for a saline soil throughout this presentation. Typically, the way that we determine if it's a saline soil or not is through lab analysis. There are some field tests that we can do to determine soil salinity, but typically the most common and most reliable is gonna be through a lab analysis. So, we might have, when we're looking at a particular soil, we might, there's varying degrees too, right? So, we might be slight to moderately saline or we might have an extremely saline soil and similar going the other way. We might be moving further away from having any salinity issues in the soil. Just quickly gonna glaze over these sources of salinity. We have naturally occurring sources, mineral weathering, fossil salts, comes from rain and capillary action, moving groundwater up. Anthropogenic sources or human cause sources, irrigation water, fertilizers. And then what we've talked quite a bit about today is industrial spills and leaks, where we have brine spills from oil and gas facilities that could be introducing more salinity into the system. So, again, looking at, we need to know kind of what type of soil we're dealing with. We need to have some sort of analysis to understand whether we're dealing with a saline soil or not, to be able to handle the soil that we have on our site appropriately. So, when we mix these soils all up and disturb them through the process of construction and get ready to put them back for reclamation, ideally it'd be nice to have all of our soil horizons segregated like this so that we can put them back. That doesn't always happen, especially with sites that might have been constructed and disturbed in the 50s, 60s, 70s. When we weren't really paying attention to top soil salvage and the importance of that. So, a lot of times what we're dealing with, especially on older sites, or ones where you get a one size fits all, top soil salvage or something like that, you might end up with this pretty homogenous soil matrix that you're dealing with. And it's important to know the chemical and physical properties of that soil as well too. So, just to kind of orient on a couple of examples, I didn't have any from North Dakota. But we're up here with the Red Star. I've got one example from Northern Wyoming in the Bighorn Basin, which is a very arid environment, which is kind of driving some of the salinity issues in that area. And then I've got another example from down in Colorado on a pipeline between Denver and Fort Collins. So, starting in Wyoming, again, this is in the Bighorn Basin, very little precipitation, very arid environment, which is likely driving a lot of the salinity issues that we're seeing in that area. The photo on the right is from, I wanna say, May or June of last year. The brown in the background is Kosha and Russian fizzle. We had little to no vegetation establishment on this location. And the operator reached out and asked if we could help in determining what was going on here and maybe get some vegetation established. So, the history of the site, it was abandoned in 2019. They did their final reclamation with the seed bed prepped and seeded in the fall of 2019. Like I mentioned, there was little to no vegetation establishment in 2022. Most of the vegetation establishment that we were seeing was around the edges of the pad. So, it was likely where we didn't have as much disturbance and might have had some more native undisturbed soil there that wasn't impacting the location. Unfortunately, not everybody's great at keeping records. So, they didn't have any initial reclamation plans or any documentation of what was done in 2019 that was readily available. So, my suggestion was, hey, let's go out and grab some soil samples and see what is going on on that location. So, we did that in July of 2022. Here are the results of that. Left-hand side, we've got the sample ID. So, basically we went to the pad, the north side of the pad, west and south. All of these samples had little to no organic matter. And one of them comes back with the textbook definition of a saline soil. Soils in the area are fairly common to have salinity issues, likely because of the arid climate and then just naturally occurring salts in the area. So, we looked at that. Again, salinity isn't a one size fits all. So, looking at this, I mean, it's a saline soil, but it's right at that where we call it saline. So, it's not gonna take as much to get this soil to be a little more hospitable to vegetation establishment. As part of the lab analysis that we did, we were able to get some agronomic recommendations back on that. Typically you're gonna get an NPK recommendation. So, we got nitrogen, phosphorus. They recommend gypsum and then compost, which is gonna be a big driver in alleviating that soil salinity. So, then looking at what's recommended for the three different samples across the top there. And then I just kind of took the average because this is a small kind of small area, probably the size of this room. It might make sense to go ahead and apply those amendments across the entire site. Whereas if you're looking at a pipeline that's hundreds of miles long, it's gonna be more feasible to look at the areas where you actually need to do something. I put the seed mix that was included in here, mostly to point out that this is a BLM site and this is the approved, the one approved seed mix for that area. So, we didn't have any flexibility in changing the seeded species to maybe get something included that was a little more salt tolerant than some of the species in this mix. So, again, we need to consider whether the soil amendments should be made site wide. I mean, with this well pad, the operator was gonna move forward with just treating it as one size fits all because none of the recommendations that we're making are going to cause any harm. It's only gonna likely cause greater success for vegetation establishment across the entire site. But if we were looking at larger disturbances or something like a pipeline, it would probably be tailored to areas where it's specifically needed. The seed mix wasn't easily adapted. And on this location, we can adjust the soil properties, the soil chemistry to promote vegetation establishment and survival. So, spoiler alert on both of these, we have not implemented any of the work or it has been implemented and I don't have results. So, that's one unfortunate thing about this talk. We don't have results yet, but these are kind of some of the things that we were looking at and the things that my friend Steve S did that led to us needing to kind of evaluate what has been done and what we can do to improve the situation. So now looking at the site in Colorado, again, like I said, it's between Denver and Fort Collins on a pipeline. The photo on the right shows what it looked like in August of 2022. You can see this pretty distinct bare strip down the middle of that pipeline. Pretty much everything growing on the outsides of that is either white top or field bindweed. So we don't have ideal vegetation whatsoever. And then looking even further out at the area, there's still a lot of white top in the area, very little perennial grasses, desirable perennial grasses. As this was, it appears that it was a formerly used as agricultural field at one point. So the site history of this pipeline was constructed in 2018 with final reclamation initiated immediately following the reclamation process of that pipeline, which if I'm remembering correctly was in the fall of 2018. The initial cost of the reclamation, I really don't know, especially considering just this small portion of the pipeline. But this one, I kind of have some dollar amounts that we can kind of look at and see where maybe some better planning in the forefront might have saved some money in the long run. So in November of 2021, there was a consultant that went out to look at the unsuccessful reclamation on a one and a half acre section of this pipeline right of way. They mowed the right of way. And I don't know if this is the order in which these things occurred, but it's the order in which they reported them. So that's my understanding is that's my best understanding of the chronological order of these treatments. So they mowed the right of way, then sprayed the weeds, applied fertilizer, reseeded for a cost of 8,600 bucks for an acre and a half. That doesn't include costs for inspections that led to this reclamation plans and anything that culminated in deciding the need for that work. A couple of the questions that really came up to me when I was looking at what was done is the timing of things. If they mowed the right of way and then sprayed the weeds, did they effectively remove the plant tissue that would have taken in the herbicide to have the intended effect? Was there time between the mowing and the spraying? There's all sorts of unanswered questions there as far as timing. And then as far as I can tell, they didn't do any soil sampling to determine if there could be anything going on in the soil that would be limiting the establishment of the desirable species. Another couple of complicating factors. So this is a closer view of the site. And you can pretty easily see that bare strip of pipeline. But surrounding the area, we have two irrigation channels. We also have a reservoir directly adjacent. And to the north of the area in that yellow dashed line, that's what appears to be a former ear, like a flood irrigation ditch that probably is no longer being used. So with this, we've got ground water fairly close to the soil surface, which then with the vegetation growth and the atmospheric draw of water, from the soil could potentially be leading to increasing the soil salinity by through capillary action bringing those salts and other nutrients to the soil surface. So like I said, this is what it looked like in 2022. Pretty very extremely weedy and very little establishment on that one strip. We still have the vegetation establishment issues, all weeds, we conducted additional soil sampling in December of 2022. So one of the things that Dr. Gornesh talked about last night was looking at the fancy shiny things and overlooking the simple things. Well, around the time that I was asked about this particular project I had received and looked at an advertisement from a lab on residual herbicide sampling. So I was like, well, that's kind of cool, we should do that. Cause maybe they tried to spray the weeds and they just nuked this soil. But fortunately we did also test results because that's one thing that was completely lacking in the one previous lab test that I was able to find was they tested for certain things. It looked like they went to a lab and selected a soils package. And it was more of a agronomic soil package rather than looking at some of the salt issues. I wasn't able to determine if it was a saline soil or not based on the results that they had received. So the analytical results, again, I kind of wasted some money. No residual herbicides whatsoever, none of the ones that were tested for had to detect in the sample. But we do have a little bit of a saline soil issue going on, again, fairly close to that textbook example of what a saline soil is. So something that we think can be addressed. So the recommendations in moving forward is to get rid of it or to start managing the white top through weed spraying. And that's gonna be a coordinated effort with the landowner as well. Because on either side of that pipeline right away, it's pretty solid white top as well. So if they're only working on their pipeline corridor, they're just gonna have an uphill battle because they're not gonna make any headway without controlling on the neighboring land. So this particular operator didn't really want too much of an approach, they wanted it to be quick, easy and simple. So the recommendation that we're looking at is incorporating a source of mulch to increase soil organic matter in the top 12 to 18 inches of that soil and tilling that in to incorporate it at a rate of five tons per acre. The one caveat I did throw on that is ensuring that the mulch does not contain additional salts. So sometimes a mulch or an organic matter source that we might consider could be cattle manure or something like that. It might've been stored where water is starting to impound which could lead to accumulations of salt in that mulch material. And if we're already dealing with a site that has salinity issues, we don't wanna make it worse by adding mulch that has additional salt in it. And then reseeding with a saline tolerant seed mix. So the seed mix that was used was provided by one of the seed vendors down in Colorado. It looks like it's a seed mix that that company uses pretty regularly. And they basically looked at the seed, I mean, I'm guessing looked at the seed catalog and we're like, oh, that's a good one. But that seed vendor also has other seed mixes. So the one that was used is a dry land pasture mix. Pretty good mix of perennial grasses, pretty desirable. But that same seed vendor also has a saline mix. So if we can use some species that are maybe a little more salt tolerant, a little more tolerant of those saline conditions, hopefully that'll increase the likelihood of success and establishment of vegetation on this site. So the 2023 plan, like I said, this is all being implemented. As with any reclamation projects, we cross our fingers and pray for rain and hope that things go well and we will probably evaluate this. We might do some additional soil sampling a few months following the application of the addition of organic matter to the soil just to see if we're having any impact on the salinity of the soil. If not, then we might reassess that. And then following with the monitoring to see if our seeding is going to be successful. So just some final thoughts that I have. Knowing the site history and previous activities can be really important. Knowing what sampling has been done, what species have been seeded, have there been any soil amendments? Anything like that can be really helpful in determining how to move forward. Sampling for the appropriate parameters. So I believe it was Brenda mentioned this morning, lab packages. And I mentioned it in this one, the client had used a package from a lab, but it was tailored more towards an agronomic standpoint, which didn't really give us all the information that we needed to determine whether it was saline soil or not. So maybe spending a little bit of additional money upfront on some additional sampling parameters could really give you some informative information. And that kind of ties into the next one, selecting the appropriate lab analysis and reports. Again, looking at what information could we need in order to put this all back together? And then the timing and the order of implementation of your treatment. So thinking back to that Colorado pipeline, if they mowed off all the vegetation and then go out with the herbicide right after that, there's, especially if it's a contact herbicide, not a soil-active herbicide, you've essentially removed the active site that is gonna provide you any control. And then taking care and selecting your treatment options for soil amendments, what type of amendment you're using, the source of that amendment, making sure that you're not increasing the problem, evaluating the seed mix that you're using instead of a one-size-fits-all seed mix, maybe looking at some of these areas that might potentially have salinity issues and tailoring a seed mix to those areas specifically. And then being selective in the herbicides that we're using to not damage our desirable species, and the list goes on and on, but just careful consideration of everything that we're implementing to make sure that one thing's not counteracting the other and we want them all to be working together to improve our success. So kind of the, some lessons learned. You know, the examples that I kind of gave, they started off by doing some reclamation. They failed, so they went back and did some more reclamation. That didn't work out, so we go back and do some more reclamation. Maybe now we're in a stage where we'd be decreasing the costs and some follow-up monitoring and a little mop up here and there. But that can come out to equal some serious money. Or maybe we spend a little bit more money upfront than we did over here. Do some additional sampling, spend a little bit more time developing different seed mixes and things like that. And hopefully our cost and reclamation would go down over time. You know, we would have a greater success upfront. We might have a little bit of touch-up or follow-up treatments that we need to do and then monitoring, which could result in a lower overall cost at the end. So overall spending additional time and money upfront could prevent the larger future costs. I'm sorry to disappoint with the complete lack of results, but I do thank you for your time and attention. If you have any questions, here's my contact information, feel free to reach out to me. I'd be happy to help. And if I have time for questions, but people probably want to hit the road, so. So the question is on these saline areas, how long after we're planting things are we seeing success from the seeded species? On these ones, to be determined. There's been other sites and I'll give you the typical answer. It depends because I mean, it depends on all the environmental factors, precipitation, things like that. Probably the fastest one that I've seen, really good success where you're getting a really good stand of vegetation was three years. But there's been others where I mean, you're going back and well, crap, it didn't work. So now what do we do? And kind of reassess and I mean, I don't even have an example of how long it could take. So the question was, do I know if there was any historical spills and did we measure chloride concentrations? Spills, not that we're documented. So especially, I mean, that one well pad up in Northern Wyoming, that was a really old well pad that was back in kind of the cowboy days of oil and gas development where things happened and then we're just kind of kicked under the rug. So that one I really don't know. The one in Colorado, I did reach out and as far as I can tell, there was no spills in that area. And then to answer your question about chlorides, they were tested for, but chlorides were not of concern in any of these areas. If you look at removing any of the material. Question was, did we look at removing any of the material disposing of it and bringing in new material? Yes, but the two operators that we're dealing with, and given the current economic climate of things, that just was not a viable option to them. They would rather try to amend the soil rather than excavate and replace. My question was, what kind of compost was that when that first thing? Okay, so the question was what kind of compost was it on the oil and gas pad in Wyoming? That actually has not been applied as far as I know. Unfortunately, there was some turnover within the company. I lost my contact. So barely, or we're just now kind of figuring out what the status of these projects are based on the recommendations that were made last fall. Because that's in the Bighorn Basin, some of the recommended options were cattle manure from, maybe some of the feedlots in the area. That's sugar beet country. So sugar beet pulp was one thing that we considered. And there was one other Brenda and I can't remember what that was. It's in my sugar beet pulp is a source of calcium. Yes. Yep. Yeah. Okay, so the question was, how do you address reclamation when there's weeds growing on your site, but they're also all around the site that you're working on as well? Well, first of all, that's a really unfortunate situation to be in. But the biggest success that I've seen in that is being cooperative with the owner of the property. You know, like for this example, it was a pipeline. So it's going through their private property. The operator is going to work with their land department to work with that landowner and propose that, hey, we will spray the weeds on your property out X amount of feet. Would you meet us in the middle and continue to control the weeds on the remainder of the property? Because if I go back so many animations, okay, if I go back, most of the white top actually occurred like not too far out. And then you kind of started to get into some patches of really good perennial grasses. So if the oil and gas operators willing to spray out 15 feet on either side of there right away, and there's another 15 feet that the landowner can take care of, that's the best way that it's gonna be. My answer would be cooperation and collaboration between stakeholders to increase the amount of area covered.