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Much has been written about the gas & oil industry in the US. My aim only is to highlight the leaking, not actively producing, oil & gas wells.
Many states have a problem with orphaned and zombie wells. Big ole Texas has a problem with orphaned and “zombie” oil wells also. Over time, oil and gas companies have been abandoning uncapped oil and gas wells in their eternal haste to produce “Black Gold, Texas Tea.” Inactive or non-compliant wells with delinquent organizational reports (Form P-5) for more than 12 months are called “orphan” wells in Texas. The state of Texas does have procedures for the disposition of orphan wells. Wells may be abandoned because of low output or the owners going bankrupt. It is possible to take over an orphaned well, though why would someone takeover a depleted orphan well or a low output well?
What’s worse, even the capped wells have begun to leak because of the corrosion and decay of well casings and plug material. The leak may be far down the hole or near the surface. These abandoned wells that are now leaking are called “zombie” wells. The zombie wells push up brackish water along with hydrocarbon liquids and vapors into the atmosphere and the surface soil as well as underground into the water table. Some underground flows are large enough that sinkholes form and fill up with polluted water.
The Oil & Gas division of the Texas Railroad Commission is responsible for “Regulating the exploration, production, & transportation of oil and natural gas in Texas.”
In a September 14, 2022, article in the Houston Chronicle, James Osborne writes
“After more than a century of oil drilling in Texas, the state is littered with abandoned wells, the vast majority of which were never properly plugged. No one’s entirely sure how many but the Texas Railroad Commission puts the number of inactive wells at almost 150,000, approximately 17,000 of which haven’t operated in more than 20 years, according to the activist group Commission Shift.“
Source: Houston Chronicle
Following up, Amanda Drane writes in her July 17, 2023, article in the Houston Chronicle
“The Railroad Commission plugged 1,068 wells during fiscal 2022 at a cost of $29.5 million, and added another 944 over the same period. During the second quarter, it said it plugged 363 wells at a cost of $11.7 million — 119 wells with state funds and 244 wells with money from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which has promised Texas nearly $320 million in phased disbursements.”
Source: Houston Chronicle
The Texas Oil & Gas Association has stated-
“the oil and natural gas industry has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to have orphaned wells properly plugged… We welcome federal funding to enhance what industry has already contributed to address orphaned wells.”
Source: The Houston Chronicle.
As can be seen, the Texas Oil & Gas Association seems to feel that it has done its job with orphaned wells. The Teflon-coated Texas Oil & Gas trade association did what trade groups are supposed to do- shield their members from public blame and immense liability.
One component of crude oil & gas is hydrogen sulfide (H2S) which resides in both the liquid and vapor phases. This component is capable of both oxidation in the air to form a series of variously oxidized sulfur products as well as elemental sulfur itself. Hydrogen sulfide is extremely toxic and prone to cause olfactory fatigue in humans. The odor threshold is extremely low which could lead one to safely vacate the area, but the “nose numbing” effect on the sense of smell can lead to a false sense of security and continued exposure. Most cases of intoxication occur in confined spaces, however.
In a way, drilling for and striking oil & gas is like opening Pandora’s box. The well can produce valuable oil & gas, but along with it comes produced water with undesired dissolved minerals, petroleum and drilling residues. It seems clear that the State has a compelling interest in the final disposition of the well. The driller or party who owns the drilling rights to the well should be financially responsible for its clean shutdown. Bankruptcy should not absolve a company from responsibility for trouble the well brings.
Industry and people are like a gas- they expand to occupy the space available to them.
This post is limited to the issue in Texas but it can exist anywhere oil & gas drilling has occurred. Obviously, the oil & gas industry represents a massive amount of economic activity and consequently it has enjoyed a privileged position in American industry in terms of regulations. It is doubtful this will change but that doesn’t mean that the beady eye of scrutiny should blink.
Even if hydrocarbon vapors and other gaseous substances blowing out of wells were not greenhouse gases, can’t a case be made for capping-off wells just to prevent pollution? There is a mentality out there that holds that if some pollution action is not mandatory, then it is not necessary. Their response to a problem is often that they “met regulatory standards.” That is, they would have done less if they could have.
While cockeyed optimists are working toward a new age of electric vehicles in the glare of an admiring public, I find myself standing off to the side mired in skepticism. What are the long-term consequences of large-scale electrification of transportation?
The industrial revolution as we in the west see it began as early as 1760 and continues through today. Outwardly it bears some resemblance to an expanding foam. A foam consists of a large number of conjoined bubbles, each representing some economic activity in the form of a product or service. A business or product hits the market and commonly grows along a sigmoidal curve. Over time across the world the mass of growing bubbles expand collectively as the population grows and technology advances. Bubbles initiate, grow and sometimes collapse or merge as consolidation and new generations of technology come along and obsolescence takes its toll.
The generation of great wealth often builds from the initiation of a bubble. The invention of the steam engine, the Bessemer process for the production of steel, the introduction of kerosene replacing whale oil, the Haber process for the production of ammonia and explosives, and thousands of other fundamental innovations to the industrial economy played part in the growing the present mass of economic bubbles worldwide.
After years of simmering on the back burner, electric automobile demand has finally taken off with help from Tesla’s electric cars. Today, electric vehicles are part of a bubble that is still in the early days of growth. The early speculators in the field stand the best chance of winning big market share. A major contribution to this development is the recent availability of cheap, energy dense lithium-ion batteries.
Of all of the metals in the periodic table, lithium is the lightest and has the greatest standard Li+/Li reduction potential at -3.045 volts. The large electrode potential and the high specific energy capacity of Lithium (3.86 Ah/gram) makes lithium an ideal anode material. Recall from basic high school electricity that DC power = volts x amps. Higher voltage and/or higher amperage gives higher power (energy per second). Of all the metals, lithium has the highest reduction potential (volts).
Rechargeable lithium batteries have high mass and volume energy density which is a distinct advantage for powering portable devices including vehicles. Progress in the development of lithium-ion batteries was worth a Nobel Prize in 2019 for John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino.
All of this happy talk of a lithium-powered rechargeable future should be cause for celebration, right? New deposits of lithium are being discovered and exploited worldwide. But cobalt? Not so much. Alternatives to LiCoO2 batteries are being explored enthusiastically with some emphasis on alternatives to cobalt. But, the clock is ticking. The more infrastructure and sales being built around cobalt-containing batteries, the harder it will become for alternatives to come into use.
One of the consequences of increasing demand for lithium in the energy marketplace is the effect on the price and availability of industrial lithium chemicals. In particular, organolithium products. The chemical industry is already seeing sharp price increases for these materials. For those in the organic chemicals domain like pharmaceuticals and organic specialty chemicals, common alkyllithium products like methyllithium and butyllithium are driven by lithium prices and are already seeing steep price increases.
Is it just background inflation or is burgeoning lithium demand driving it? Both I’d say. Potentially worse is the effect on manufacturers of organolithium products. Will they stay in the organolithium business, at least in the US, or switch to energy-related products? It is my guess that there will always be suppliers for organolithium demand in chemical processing.
A concern with increasing lithium demand has to do with recycling of lithium and perhaps cobalt. Hopefully there are people working on this with an eye to scale up soon. A rechargeable battery contains a dog’s lunch of chemical substances, not all of which may be economically recoverable to specification for reuse. In general, chemical processes can be devised to recover and purify components. But, the costs of achieving the desired specification may price it out of the market. With lithium recovery, in general the lithium in a recovery process must be taken to the point where it is an actual raw material for battery use and meets the specifications. Mines often produce lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide as their output. Li2CO3 is convenient because it precipitates from aqueous mixtures. It must also be price competitive with “virgin” lithium raw materials as well.
Lithium ranks 33rd in terrestrial abundance and less than that in cosmic abundance. Unlike some other elements like iron, lithium nuclei formed are rapidly destroyed in stars throughout their life cycle. Lithium nuclei are just too delicate to survive stellar interiors. The big bang is thought to have produced a small amount of primordial lithium-7. Most lithium seems to form during spallation reactions when galactic cosmic rays collide with interstellar carbon, nitrogen and oxygen (CNO) nuclei and are split apart from high energy collisions yielding lithium, beryllium and boron- LiBeB. All three elements of LiBeB are cosmically scarce as shown on the chart below.
Lithium is found chiefly in two forms geologically. One is in granite pegmatite formations such as the pyroxene mineral spodumene, or lithium aluminum inosilicate, LiAl(SiO3)2. This lithium mineral is obtained through hard rock mining in a few locations globally, chiefly Australia.
Chemical Definition: Salt; an ionic compound; A salt consists of the positive ion (cation) of a base and the negative ion (anion) of an acid. The word “salt” is a large category of substances, but for maximum confusion it also refers to a specific compound, NaCl or common table salt. In this post the word refers to the category of ionic compounds.
The other source category is lithium-enriched brines. The US Geological Survey has proposed a geological model for brine or salt deposition. According to Bradley, et al.,
“All producing lithium brine deposits share a number of first-order characteristics: (1) arid climate; (2) closed basin containing a laya or salar; (3) tectonically driven subsidence; (4) associated igneous or geothermal activity; (5) suitable lithium source-rocks; 6) one or more adequate aquifers; and (7) sufficient time to concentrate a brine.”
Lithium and other soluble metal species are extracted from underground source rock by hot, high pressure hydrothermal fluids and eventually end up in subsurface, in underwater brine pools or on the surface as a salt lake or a salt flat or salar. These deposits commonly accumulate in isolated locations that have prevented drainage. An excellent summary of salt deposits can be found here.
Critical to any kind of mineral mining is the definition of an economic deposit. The size of an economic deposit varies with the market value of the mineral, meaning that as the value per ton of ore increases, the extent of the economic deposit may increase to include less concentrated ore. If you want to invest in a mine, it is good to understand this. A good opportunity may vanish if the market price of the mineral or metal drops below the profit objectives. Hopefully this happens before investment dollars are spent digging dirt.
Lithium mining seems to be a reasonably safe investment given the anticipated demand growth unless страшный товарищ путины invasion of Ukraine lets the nuclear genie out of the bottle.
Just for fun, there is an old joke about the definition of a mine-
Mine; noun, a hole in the ground with a liar standing at the top.
As interest in lithium batteries continues to ramp upwards, interest in other metals like cobalt used in lithium batteries advances with it. Cobalt has been identified as a particularly problematic metal as the largest single source is in the troubled mineral rich Democratic Republic of Congo. Rightly or not, some are comparing cobalt from Congo to blood diamonds.
The Idaho Cobalt Belt (ICB) lies on the eastern edge of Idaho along the Montana border running to the northwest for about 60 km. Cobalt was identified in the area in 1900. An abstract in the USGS Publications Warehouse gives a brief technical description of the Idaho Cobalt Belt. The full paper can be downloaded from a publisher’s paywall site. (Why a government agency makes us pay for it’s information work product is beyond my comprehension.)
Another source describes the belt as “originally exhalative, stratiform mineralization within the Proterozoic Yellow-Jacket formation”. The Yellow-Jacket formation is connected with the Yellowjacket mine.
According to EastIdahoNews.com, the Australian firm Jervois Global has suspended the opening of cobalt mining operation in the ICB for an unspecified time. Jervois CEO Bryce Crocker said the move is “due to continuing low cobalt prices and U.S. inflationary impacts on construction costs.” Over the last 12 months the price of cobalt has dropped from $81,923/T to $34,930/T as of 3/30/23.
The number of cobalt-bearing minerals is too numerous to list here, but a thorough list can be found at minedat.org. Cobalt is rarely found alone, but instead is combined with other metals as a variety of minerals. Important ores of cobalt are Cobaltite, CoAsS, Glaucodot, (Co0.50Fe0.50)AsS, Skuttarudite, CoAs3, and Erythrite, Co3(AsO4)2 . 8H2O. Arsenic is found in 93 cobalt minerals. Other notably abundant elements found with cobalt are sulfur (72 Co minerals), nickel, iron and copper. Other elements associated with cobalt are listed in the minedat.org reference.
The Idaho Cobalt Belt is described as a “strata-bound copper-cobalt district hosted by the Yellowjacket Proterozoic Formation” (1).
According to the Cobalt Institute, there are 5 types of economic geological concentrations of cobalt: Sediment hosted, Hydrothermal and Volcanogenic, Magmatic Sulfides, Laterites and Manganese Nodules, and Cobalt-Rich Crusts.
The crustal abundance of cobalt can be seen in the graph below. From the graph it appears that cobalt, nickel, copper, chromium, zinc, vanadium and manganese have similar crustal abundances.
Cobalt is rarely the sole economic mineral at a mine, at least outside of the Congo. Pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, extraction and electrolytic processing may be used in combination to produce streams of copper, nickel and cobalt. The beneficiation and recovery process of purified cobalt metal or cobalt salt will depend a great deal on the concentration and chemical nature of the elements present.
According to Mindat.com, the three cobalt-bearing minerals found at the Blackbird Mining District are: Siderite, Ludlamite and Vivianite. All three varieties of host rock are iron (II) minerals.
Cobalt has 2 common oxidation states, 2+ and 3+. According to a USGS reference, the atomic radii of Co2+ and Co3+ are similar to Mg2+, Mn4+, Fe2+ and Fe3+, and Ni2+, meaning that cobalt can substitute for any of these elements in many minerals. The practical consequence of the ability of cations to substitute is a large number of mineral variations. While chemically interesting, this poses complications for ore processing.
Like all metals mining, cobalt must be separated from the ore. Cobalt is not found as the native metal but rather as an ionic complex along with copper and nickel cations. The negative counter-ions are typically silicates and sulfides. Cationic metals ultimately must be reduced to the native metal, but first the desired metal cation must be selectively removed from a dog’s lunch of ionic and covalent species. The desired metal may be removed early in the separation process or after a long series of processing steps to remove other components.
All of the elements and their respective ionic forms have different physical and chemical properties. These differences are exploited in order to separate the elements.
(1) Nold, J.L., Mineralium Deposita, July 1990, Vol 25, Issue 3, p. 163-168. DOI 10.1007/BF00190377
The town of Uravan, Colorado, shows up on maps and road signs. You might think it is a physical town. It sits north of Naturita (pronounced natter reeta), CO, on Hwy 141 about 15 miles up the narrow San Miguel River valley. If you look at it’s Wikipedia page, you’ll see a picture of a bare area of ground. Today all that remains at the surface is a ball field and picnic tables. Every bit of the town and the mill has been demolished, shredded and buried within the confines of a Superfund site. Even contaminated bulldozer blades were buried on-site. Also remaining is a Umetco commercial building. Umetco, a Dow Chemical subsidiary, was responsible for managing the reclamation of the site which lasted from 1987 to 2007.
Main uranium deposits in the US (DoE Office of Legacy Management, 2015)
The local topography consists of sandstone canyons and mesas. The map below (north is up) shows a large area of land west of the valley mill site and up above on Club Mesa. This is the location of buried mill tailings and other contaminated materials. The major radiological contaminant is Radium-226 and its daughter products. Radium is a common and troublesome constituent in uranium-bearing ore.
As an aside, I would recommend taking Colorado Hwy 141 from Naturita north through Gateway enroute to Grand Junction if you’re in the area. Truthfully, Uravan isn’t along the route to somewhere most people would want to go except for locals. This stretch of road is called the Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway and is absolutely gorgeous. Just like in nearby Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, red sandstone is the dominant country rock in that part of the Colorado Plateau. You’ll drive through breathtaking canyons of red sandstone along the Dolores River, south of Gateway.
During its post-WWII heyday, the company town of Uravan, CO, was one of a number of thriving yellowcake boomtowns in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Overall, there were over 900 uranium mines in operation. The name “Uravan” comes from the URAnium-VANadium ore that was processed there. Uravan was one cog in a large wheel of uranium production first for the Manhattan Project then for the Atomic Energy Commission..
Uravan produced concentrate which was was trucked to Grand Junction, CO, to the Climax Uranium Mill for further processing. Activity at the Climax site began in 1943 for uranium procurement and processing of vanadium mill tailings for uranium.
An excellent timeline of uranium history in western Colorado can be found at the Museums of Western Colorado web site.
Uravan Mineral Belt (Wikipedia)
The earliest mining activity at what became Uravan was for radium recovery beginning in 1912 and falling off by 1923. By 1935 the mill was expanded for vanadium recovery and from 1940 to 1984 the mill was used to process uranium and vanadium.
The predominant ore that was processed at Uravan was Carnotite with a nominal composition of K2(UO2)2(VO4)2·3H2O with variable waters of hydration. Elemental uranium is a dense silvery metal that oxidizes in air, reacts with water and dissolves in oxidizing acids. It has two important oxidation states: the +4 uranous oxidation state which is green and the +6 uranyl oxidation state, UO22+, which is yellow. The uranous form is found in the UO2 mineral Uraninite and the uranium silicate Coffinite. The uranyl vanadate form is found with potassium cation in Carnotite, with cesium in Margaritasite, and with calcium in Tyuyamunite.
Yellow carnotite ore (Colorado Geological Survey)
Uranium-vanadium rich sandstone is found in Club Mesa to the west and just above the town of Uravan. This occurrance is part of the larger Uravan Mineral Belt which encompasses local commercial grade uranium ore. The mesa covers 6 sq miles and is bounded by the San Miguel River, the Dolores River, Saucer Basin and Hieroglyphic Canyon. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the average grade of the ore ranged from 0.25 to1.5 % U3O8 and 1.5 to 5.0 % V2O5 (ref 1).
From an extensive drilling study by the USGS, the Salt Wash member of the Morrison formation sandstone of the late Jurassic age was found to be the host for most of the commercial-grade (in 1957) uranium-vanadium in the Club Mesa area.
Beginning in 1936, the mill site was owned by US Vanadium Corporation and built up to process vanadium ore. An entire town was constructed on site to accommodate workers. It also produced a uranium oxide side-stream as a yellow pigment. Then along came the nuclear age.
References
(1) Results of US Geological Survey Exploration for Uranium-Vanadium Deposits in the Club Mesa Area, Uravan District, Montrose County, Colorado, Boardman, Litsey, and Bowers, May, 1957, Trace Elements Memorandum Report 979.
A Blacksmith shop is all that remains of Anaconda, Colorado.
The discovery of gold in the early 1890’s west of Pikes Peak at Cripple Creek was the last major gold rush in Colorado. This discovery coincided with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Act which compelled the government to guarantee a price for silver. The repeal of the Sherman Silver Act led to an immediate collapse in silver prices and the crash of virtually all silver mining operations. As a result, miners in the area made their way to Cripple Creek for newly discovered gold.
Today many of the valleys around Cripple Creek and Victor are largely regrown and quiet. Little indication remains of the towns and mills that once covered the area. Many mining towns were consumed by fire and a few were rebuilt. Once town left to extinction is Anaconda.
In the winter of 1904 a fire consumed the mining town of Anaconda. Today, all that remains is the shell of a blacksmith shop. This abandoned building sits at the end of the line on the Cripple Creek and Victor Narrow Gauge Railroad (CC&V). Near Anaconda were a number of significant mines- the Mary McKinney, the Doctor Jack Pot, the Chickenhawk, the Anaconda mine and others.
Nearby is the Mollie Kathleen mine which is open for tours. This tour involves piling into a small-man lift and dropping 1000 ft into the mine. This puts you below the level of Cripple Creek, located in the valley below. If you are very lucky, the big open pit gold mine on the other side of the mountain will do some bench blasting while you are down there. It’s very exciting. The mountain between the big CC&V mine and the Mollie Kathleen is riddled with shafts and drifts.
The Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine east of Cripple Creek is a large open pit gold mining operation run by Newmont Mining Corporation. The gold in the mine is highly disseminated in microscopic form and is recovered by cyanide heap extraction. The CC&V deposit is the remnant of an extinct volcano that is highly brecciated. Hydrothermal water has extracted and transported gold throughout the throat of the volcano and into the surrounding rock. However, much of the gold (ca 30 %) is tied up as gold telluride, AuTe2, also known as calaverite. The gold in calaverite cannot be extracted with cyanide and must be left behind. The tellurium can be removed by roasting and burning off the oxide, but this is highly polluting. This gold formation is where the famous Cresson Vug was located. It was a cavity in the formation that yielded 60,000 troy ounces of gold.
CC&V Steam Engine
The CC&V railroad is a modest tourist attraction located on the outskirts of Cripple Creek. The line has several operating steam locomotives that take passengers on a 45 minute trip into the countryside. Our engineer estimated the horsepower of the engine above to be ca 20 hp. Narrow gauge rail was popular in mountainous areas as opposed to standard gauge owing to the ability to negotiate a tighter turn radius.
After a weekend in the Alma, CO, mining district, I have come around a bit on the merits of gold mining. Oh sure, I have always known that it was a dirty business, what with the mercury, the cyanide, the acidic tailings piles, and the blighted landscapes. But for God sakes man, it’s GOLD!
Last weekend was different. It wasn’t a dispassionate examination of mining history. I could see miles of blighted landscape heaped with spent alluvium along the road from Fairplay to Alma. To the north, over Hoosier Pass, are the McMansions of Breckenridge where new and old wealth mingle. To the south of Fairplay is a sizeable expanse of gravel and cobble heaps from past placer mining.
The photo shows just a short stretch of the creek bed undergoing placer mining on the north end of Fairplay. Granted, the mining company is using gravity separation by way of the sluice to recover the gold. The stones are all rounded and well weathered, so one might expect the tailings to release little in the way of toxic leachate. But what a colossal mess they have made of the landscape. Perhaps they have put up a bond assuring that restoration of the landscape will happen when the mining ceases. I don’t know. That does not seem to be the way of past mining in the district.
My point is this. Isn’t there some madness in gold mining? At best a handful of people get wealthy from putting more gold on the market. I would argue that gold does not have the utility of iron, aluminum, or copper for instance. It does not go into items that advance civilization and economics like tractors, bridges, ships or wires. Gold does not go on to enable the growth of industry in the manner a base metal. Some of it adorns our fingers but most falls into the hands of anonymous individuals and governments who hoard vast caches of the metal. Granted, a bit of the annual production goes into electronics and a few other applications.
The madness in gold mining is that people are willing to go to any length or bankrupt themselves to obtain a metal that in the end benefits approximately no one. Most of the metal will quietly sit in a vault somewhere producing nothing. It won’t support a building or a roadway over a river. It won’t produce goods or services, nor will it bring a silent heart back to life. It can only support abstractions like the notion of value. We’re willing to put up with scarred landscapes, mercury pollution and acidic runoff produced by other people for an abstraction. That is pretty funny.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
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