is fracwater hazmat?

Nicholas, you might want to look into hauling fresh water. There is a need for it in the oilfield.

 

Nicolas, look into Crown of Thorns in Beeville. They haul fresh water, salt water and mud. They are looking for 5 - 10 vacuum truck drivers at the moment, but maybe they'll have a transport job or two.

511 S. WASHINGTON ST.
BEEVILLE, TX 78102
http://cottransport.com/
(361) 358-2100
Talk to Mike, or Joe

 

I was hauling "fresh" water for fracs in the Jonah Field (EnCana) that was recycled. Smelled just like straight up flowback water. And flowback has totally different smells to it depending on what type of well it is (NG or Oil), who did the frac, and location. Kind of weird, but each frac had different smells and color to it. The fracs around Eastern Wyoming/Colorado produced dark brown/reddish flowback. The fracs out in Western Wyoming had a milky yellow colored flowback.

But I never had placards on my water tanker; hauled fresh, flowback, and production.

In addition to hauling water, we also did frac heating, hot oiling, and propane. Money was good in the Oilfield, but I was tired of being away from home, and took a job hauling fuel instead.

Yep, they don't like that. Was loading at site, and had a dude next to me spill about 2 BBLs on the ground. I was empty, he was full, so I hooked up a hose and turned my pump to suck, and cleaned it up for him.

 

They do not want a drop spilled because that gives the EPA an excuse to get a sample of it and have it tested to find out the truth about what it really is. Site foreman are given strict orders not to let anyone near a spill at all costs and drivers are basiclly threatened with life and limb to guard their load and not let anyone come near their truck.

 

I find it hard to take your "job search" seriously. You are having a "resume" professionally produced to send to these companies? Do you ralize that once they see your "demands" or "restrictions".....your resume will hit "file 13"??

If you are allergic to so much......why would you look for work in one of the dirtiest job environments?

FRAC water is not hazardous, until the chemicals the company uses are blended into it. 35 years ago the chemicals were blended into the water on location prior to doing the frac. Some of those chemicals were....and are.......hazardous. Many of them were....and are......non-hazardous. BUT.....water haulers usually did not...and do not....handle the chemicals themselves. The frac crew (company employees) handle the chemicals. 35 years ago most of the chemicals were dry and arrived on location in paper bags, shrink wrapped on pallets. Now most of the chemicals arrive in bulk form in liquid tankers or in totes and are mixed on the fly, versus premixed as in days gone by.

The polymer gel that is used to carry the frac sand is a non-hazardous substance. It is a powder that is a partial blend of bentonite (a natural rock mined in Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming) and plastic resin (powder). They use a gel to carry the sand, because just water would allow the sand to fall out and compact faster than they could pump it. 35 years ago El Paso Natural Gas was infamous for doing "non-gelled" frac's in Colorado and New Mexico. (I hated those ###### jobs with a passion.)

I tell ya now......If the stuff used for fracing were as "Toxic" as Texasmorrel implies....I would be bones in the ground now......not sitting here, typing on a machne manufactured from products created from crude oil, while sitting in the cab of a truck manufactured with products derived from crude oil....lubricated by products derived from crude oil....and run on a product derived from.......CRUDE OIL. I cemented and frac'ed oil and gas wells for 10 years. I dumped untold thousands of pounds of various chemicals for both jobs during the mixing stage....and during the pumping stage too. The 2 worst chemicals I worked with then, were hydrofluoric acid and sulfuric acid. Some times I was on jobs that were called "Perf Washes"...where hydrochloric acid and chlorine bleach were used. IF someone was silly enough to allow those two chemicals to mix together....then things were pretty danged toxic.

I'm still alive and kicking....so things must not have been to toxic.....35 years ago.



(pssssssst....don't say anything about that trade secret give away)

 

Well then I just guess all the emergency responders and myself are just paranoid. Since its so non toxic why don't you have a big ol' swig of it and lets see how non toxic it is. But seriously, your argument that the final market product of a substance is not hazerdous therefore the crude product can not be hazerdous is flawed logic. Besides you are talking apples and oranges. I was talking about frac water and you were talking oil, two different things.

 

Hanzerik, funny that you say that, I have hauled MANY colors of flowback myself, all smelling vastly different. Sometimes they stuff was yellow, red, gray (recycled), brown, and black....all in all it all STINKS and I hated getting it on me because I didn't like how it smelled.

My old boss suckered me in to filling in for a driver next sat. for some spare $$$ on the side, I don't think I'll ever get away from hauling that crap even now when I'm a flatbedder lol.

 

Now....No where did I say or imply, that I feel Crude Oil is not hazardous. It is. BUT.....there are substances made from crude oil that are far more hazardous than crude oil.

The point I was trying to make, for others as well as for you is this.

1; 35 years ago (when standard PPE protocol for handling most frac and cementing chemicals was a face mask and goggles) I was involved (for 10 years) in handling the substances you and so many others are yammering about being "Toxic" (it irks me to no end to see this type of yammering).

As someone whom has spent the majority of his career handling hazardous substances, IF those substances had been toxic at all....I would not be on this computer responding to your yammer. 35 years, even 25 years, is a very long time to be free of any of the physical damage TOXIC substances cause. You say Emergency Responders answer calls to accidents involving "Frac Equipment" in full haz-mat suits. That just is not so. The fire departments have a PPE protocol, just as every chemical manufacturing plant I have ever been in does. That protocol says they respond to every call in their "fire protection gear". The only time fire fighters, or chemical plant workers, suit up in the full haz-mat gear, is when they know for a FACT THAT THEY ARE DEALING WITH SOMETHING THAT REQUIRES A FULL HAZ-MAT SUIT (usually the fire department commander calls out the Haz-Mat response unit). This is especially true in states like Texas, where the heat and humidity puts those responders or plant workers lives at jeopardy while they wear those suits. Even the typical Tyvek suit causes your body to overheat from wearing it (I have worn several hundred of the tyvek chemical suits over the years).

2; My point about all those products made from crude oil is just that. A point about OUR daily lives and what it is that we use crude oil for.


It galls me the nerve of some people. Crying "Fowl" at so many things....while the lives they lead consume so much made from the very things they cry "Fowl" over.

It takes specific steps to extract crude oil from the ground. Crude oil is, by it's very existance, a natural substance. Yes, crude oil will burn if set on fire. But....even crude oil that contains hydrogen sulfide will not kill you if you come in contact with it on your skin. TOXIC substances kill you. There is not any lee-way in that fact. Those substances kill you either quickly, as when you ingest cyanide gas, or over the course of several years, as with asbestos poisoning.

The chemicals used on frac jobs are just that. Chemicals. And those chemicals are all....every last one of them, properly labeled so that the people handling them know what the specific hazards are. Nothing you say here changes that fact. Nobody hides the hazard. Nobody lies about the hazard.

What some people do lie about, is how their well water became contaminated. What some people do to mislead the public is despicable. The majority of contaminated water wells are contaminated by methane. Methane is a naturally occurring substance found at multiple levels in the ground. Landfills generate massive quantities of methane. That is why, today, landfills are lined with giant sheets of poly-urethane, when they are started....to prevent the methane and methane contaminated liquids from leaching into the ground water table and aquifers.

Most of the frac jobs done today, are done at over 8,000 feet in depth. To suggest that the frac fluids are migrating across mutliple layers of dense rock and contaminating the aquifers is irresponsible and ignorant. If the annulus of those wells was shoddily done that migration of pressurized fluids could occur, then well casing and well tubing would be spewing out all over the country, where those bad wells were at.

I have been on an oil well site, where the well casing and tubing was spit out of the well, because of bad cementing. That was something that occurred in my first few days of training to work on oil wells, back in 1979. It was on an AMOCO well that was located between Worland Wyoming and Thermopolis Wyoming. It was the scariest, most exciting thing, I had ever seen. It is also something I shall never forget, and it was something which inspired me to learn everything I could learn, about oil wells and how they are created.