2 ms·

EPA and TCEQ do have airplanes with analytic equipment equipped to fly through emergency disaster areas and take measurements. But I still don't think they do a

EPA and TCEQ do have airplanes with analytic equipment equipped to fly through emergency disaster areas and take measurements. But I still don't think they do a good job of measuring the air that residents are breathing 5-20 feet above ground level. > If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now. Environmental fines are usually extremely low (if caught by government) and often non-existent (when caught and reported by the polluting company). The regulatory systems genuinely work hard to try to allow industrial polluters to identify, report, and fix their own problems. Otherwise it would create a culture of hiding problems. The regulatory agencies use the safe, open communication with industrial polluters to disseminate "best practices" on how to reduce emissions. I'm not arguing the current system is best, but just that there are a few potential problems with making things more adversarial which should be at least thoroughly considered and discussed. Fines are only "large" when there's clearly willful, known violation of environmental regulations. Such as if there has been obvious, active, long-term covering-up and managerial actions taken to hide the problems. Or if there are repeated orders to fix a problem and the company continues without remedying the issue. And even then, they aren't very large. > If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now. I'd support that. For me, the model I came up with is to get $150 million donated by some philanthropist and put together a best practice, full scale pilot demo in the Houston, Lake Jackson, or Baton Rouge area. Each monitoring station would cost about $1 million upfront and probably $100,000-200,000 per year to run. You'd need 50-100 of these to monitor the boundaries of each plant and the boundaries of each nearby neighborhood. I think if this was shown to identify which individual business units were leaking, it would result in much lower emissions. A 5-year trial should be enough to help gather federal tax dollars from a sympathetic administration to build a public version of this, or build the support to require and facilities with a "Reportable Quantity" of environmentally hazardous materials onsite to have effective emissions monitoring of both air and water at the boundaries of the facility.

sitkack 3y ago
Not arguing, but at 1M per station, that sounds like a self contained automated lab with various kinds of spectrometers. What could one do with 10k per station? 1k? This looks pretty bad ass, https://ichrom.com/mid-4500-mass-spectrometer/ https://ichrom.com/mid-4500-mass-spectrometer/ On the low end, there are MEMs VOC sensors like https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/environmental-sensors/gas-sensors/bme688/ https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/environmental-senso... It would be trivial to build a solar powered, voc sensor node that talked lora. Easily less than 30$ BOM in qty 10.
- reaperman 3y ago
  http://www.state.wv.us/admin/purchase/bids/FY2014/B_DEP16574_01.pdf http://www.state.wv.us/admin/purchase/bids/FY2014/B_DEP16574... See here a public bid where a particularly low-cost standalone CEMS unit (will still need a good deal of engineering and construction above this cost) for a single basic chemical species (SO2) costs $15,000. In an area like Deer Park, TX, you might need 8-35 of these per monitoring station (highest variety of chemicals will be near 3rd party tank farms like ITC, along major chemical pipeline networks, at chemical railyard terminals, and ocean shipping terminals). Engineering costs to get a building put in place, telecommunications, power delivery, and SCADA control integration would be expected to run at least another $100,000 not counting any in-house project management hours. They'll need regular expensive maintenance and some installed redundancy. To give you a sense of the scale, here are just energy pipelines (natural gas, crude oil, etc). These maps lack thousands of chemical pipelines. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energy-web-atlas-world-pipeline-solution-enables-faster-decisions-300871054.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energy-web-atlas-wo... https://pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/ https://pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/ Here are some maps of very basic commodity chemical pipelines, but cost $2,000 each to purchase. https://www.petrochemwire.com/maps-and-data/ https://www.petrochemwire.com/maps-and-data/ This one facility here is about 380 ft x 350 ft. There is a single pipeline going to this tiny facility which carries around 7 million pounds of chlorine per day. But that pipeline is just serving a tiny 3 acres of the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex in Freeport, TX which spans well over 13,000 acres. Just extracting the chlorine from salt water for this complex requires enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Freeport,+TX+77541/@28.9612012,-95.3235122,146m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x8640595961a3e7ad:0x42e685217bd37cba!8m2!3d28.9541368!4d-95.3596617!16zL20vMF95bjk?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Freeport,+TX+77541/@28.961...
- reaperman 3y ago
  You cant do anything at all with $10k per station. Literally nothing. Minimum $250k “Total VOC” is useless, because without identifying the specific chemical sub-family (e.g. differentiation between ethyl acrylate vs butyl acrylate) you wont be able to tell which company is responsible for the leak or what the leak is. > self-contained automated lab Is roughly correct and is the level generally needed. It may be possible to do a bit cheaper, but probably not less than $250,000. Go too cheap and everything will be clogged and broken all the time and you wont get any actionable data for the money you spent. A spectrometer or chromatograph is just one piece of the overall system, what you’ll want to search or build is a “gas analyzer” for the specific compounds. Take a look here for what those look like: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrumentation/gas-analysis https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrum... They all also need pretty constant skilled maintenance from expensive technicians. It may be possible to design and manufacture cheaper continuous gas samplers and analyzers but I wouldn’t do that just for this project, that would be its own startup and would need to compete on its own in the industrial market, which is heavily reliant on incumbent relationships and customers are often willing to spend a lot more so they get reliability and are generally unwilling to bet even one hour of potential production time. Because each hour of production can be millions of dollars of revenue, it justifies spending an extra $100k to prevent that downtime. There’s not actually a lot of cost pressure on these gas analyzers at the moment. But if every plant was required to install 10 of them by law, then maybe buyers would care when they need to buy them for several plants at the same time.

sitkack 3y ago

Not arguing, but at 1M per station, that sounds like a self contained automated lab with various kinds of spectrometers. What could one do with 10k per station? 1k? This looks pretty bad ass, https://ichrom.com/mid-4500-mass-spectrometer/ https://ichrom.com/mid-4500-mass-spectrometer/ On the low end, there are MEMs VOC sensors like https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/environmental-sensors/gas-sensors/bme688/ https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/environmental-senso... It would be trivial to build a solar powered, voc sensor node that talked lora. Easily less than 30$ BOM in qty 10.

reaperman 3y ago
http://www.state.wv.us/admin/purchase/bids/FY2014/B_DEP16574_01.pdf http://www.state.wv.us/admin/purchase/bids/FY2014/B_DEP16574... See here a public bid where a particularly low-cost standalone CEMS unit (will still need a good deal of engineering and construction above this cost) for a single basic chemical species (SO2) costs $15,000. In an area like Deer Park, TX, you might need 8-35 of these per monitoring station (highest variety of chemicals will be near 3rd party tank farms like ITC, along major chemical pipeline networks, at chemical railyard terminals, and ocean shipping terminals). Engineering costs to get a building put in place, telecommunications, power delivery, and SCADA control integration would be expected to run at least another $100,000 not counting any in-house project management hours. They'll need regular expensive maintenance and some installed redundancy. To give you a sense of the scale, here are just energy pipelines (natural gas, crude oil, etc). These maps lack thousands of chemical pipelines. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energy-web-atlas-world-pipeline-solution-enables-faster-decisions-300871054.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energy-web-atlas-wo... https://pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/ https://pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/ Here are some maps of very basic commodity chemical pipelines, but cost $2,000 each to purchase. https://www.petrochemwire.com/maps-and-data/ https://www.petrochemwire.com/maps-and-data/ This one facility here is about 380 ft x 350 ft. There is a single pipeline going to this tiny facility which carries around 7 million pounds of chlorine per day. But that pipeline is just serving a tiny 3 acres of the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex in Freeport, TX which spans well over 13,000 acres. Just extracting the chlorine from salt water for this complex requires enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Freeport,+TX+77541/@28.9612012,-95.3235122,146m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x8640595961a3e7ad:0x42e685217bd37cba!8m2!3d28.9541368!4d-95.3596617!16zL20vMF95bjk?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Freeport,+TX+77541/@28.961...
reaperman 3y ago
You cant do anything at all with $10k per station. Literally nothing. Minimum $250k “Total VOC” is useless, because without identifying the specific chemical sub-family (e.g. differentiation between ethyl acrylate vs butyl acrylate) you wont be able to tell which company is responsible for the leak or what the leak is. > self-contained automated lab Is roughly correct and is the level generally needed. It may be possible to do a bit cheaper, but probably not less than $250,000. Go too cheap and everything will be clogged and broken all the time and you wont get any actionable data for the money you spent. A spectrometer or chromatograph is just one piece of the overall system, what you’ll want to search or build is a “gas analyzer” for the specific compounds. Take a look here for what those look like: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrumentation/gas-analysis https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrum... They all also need pretty constant skilled maintenance from expensive technicians. It may be possible to design and manufacture cheaper continuous gas samplers and analyzers but I wouldn’t do that just for this project, that would be its own startup and would need to compete on its own in the industrial market, which is heavily reliant on incumbent relationships and customers are often willing to spend a lot more so they get reliability and are generally unwilling to bet even one hour of potential production time. Because each hour of production can be millions of dollars of revenue, it justifies spending an extra $100k to prevent that downtime. There’s not actually a lot of cost pressure on these gas analyzers at the moment. But if every plant was required to install 10 of them by law, then maybe buyers would care when they need to buy them for several plants at the same time.