Latest / Conservation Stories / Dry Side Dispatch • September 11th • Katherine Coyle

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Dry Side Dispatch • September 11th • Katherine Coyle · Conservation Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Hello, everyone. You caught us. Midlife.
• 0:03
  Speaker B: Yes, it's true. That's true.
• 0:05
  Speaker A: Welcome to the dry side Dispatch brought to you by HSI Water. And we are here with Catherine Benson.
• 0:12
  Speaker B: Catherine Benson. We were discussing. Jess.
• 0:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. We were just discussing your last name. In the email, your former name was Coil.
• 0:18
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 0:19
  Speaker A: And we asked what your middle name, what your mate, what your name was, and you said, vincent, I'm not going. How do you get Benson out of C, O, Y, L, E. Because I
• 0:27
  Speaker B: was like, how do you pronounce it? I wasn't sure. So.
• 0:30
  Speaker C: Very fresh.
• 0:32
  Speaker A: Very.
• 0:32
  Speaker B: Well, congratulations. When did this happen?
• 0:35
  Speaker C: We got married in January, and then I finally got around to changing my name a couple months ago. Procrastinated it.
• 0:41
  Speaker B: It's a thing.
• 0:42
  Speaker A: As someone who's been married for 31 years. And my wife offers her condolences.
• 0:46
  Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you. I'm still waiting on that Social Security card. Yeah, right.
• 0:51
  Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, you got to get that done so you can vote November girl.
• 0:55
  Speaker C: I got my driver's license changed.
• 0:57
  Speaker B: Okay, well, maybe that'll work. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Well, we had a little issue getting here this morning, and I apologize.
• 1:05
  Speaker A: All right.
• 1:05
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:06
  Speaker B: There's a classic.
• 1:07
  Speaker C: Lubbock Construction.
• 1:09
  Speaker B: Yes. Right. Yeah. So the. In almost. The parking lot over here at the radio station is. I mean, it is so close. It is almost the parking lot that's
• 1:17
  Speaker A: dug up entire intersection.
• 1:18
  Speaker B: And you cannot. And there's no. If you come in from the north side, there's no easy way.
• 1:25
  Speaker A: New. No.
• 1:26
  Speaker B: To just detour around it. And I don't. I guess they don't even offer a detour around it. So it's just figure your own way. So I helped her get here via a few muddy dirt roads.
• 1:39
  Speaker C: Off road again for the first time.
• 1:40
  Speaker A: Listen, thank God we got a little bit of rain somewhere last night.
• 1:43
  Speaker B: It's true.
• 1:43
  Speaker C: Very true.
• 1:44
  Speaker A: I mean, it's true.
• 1:45
  Speaker C: Hopefully we get more tonight.
• 1:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, maybe. You know, your lips to God's ears.
• 1:49
  Speaker C: I'll take it.
• 1:49
  Speaker B: See? So, Catherine, tell us a little bit about yourself. So we. I heard you speak at Purdue's water conference and was like, oh, this is somebody we have to have on the radio.
• 1:58
  Speaker C: Yeah. So I'm a PhD student at Texas Tech in the Department of Plant and Soil Science. This is my second year. I hold a bachelor's in geoscience, and then I bailed on that and got a master's in Soil Science. Environmental Soil chemistry, specifically. I'm also an NSF graduate research fellow, so.
• 2:18
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 2:19
  Speaker C: I get. They pay me.
• 2:20
  Speaker B: That means you get Paid. Yes.
• 2:22
  Speaker C: And I'm from Wichita Falls, Texas.
• 2:24
  Speaker B: Wichita Falls. I like Wichita Falls.
• 2:27
  Speaker A: I do, too.
• 2:27
  Speaker C: Yep. We moved there in 2014, so I had the pleasure of starting eighth grade there.
• 2:32
  Speaker B: Oh, fun.
• 2:33
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Speaker B: Oh, what a bad time to move.
• 2:34
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 2:36
  Speaker B: Oh, my goodness.
• 2:37
  Speaker C: But that was actually. We moved there during the big drought. That was. That was transformative, I think, for my career path or what I wanted to do.
• 2:46
  Speaker B: Oh, really?
• 2:47
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 2:47
  Speaker B: Yeah. Just seeing all that happen. Where'd you come from when you moved there?
• 2:50
  Speaker C: We came from Pennsylvania.
• 2:51
  Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Wow.
• 2:56
  Speaker C: Yeah. So huge culture shock.
• 2:58
  Speaker B: Just.
• 2:58
  Speaker C: Just a scotch, you know, no trees, no nothing.
• 3:02
  Speaker B: So I want to make sure all of our sound is up pretty good. Do we sound good?
• 3:06
  Speaker C: Do I sound okay?
• 3:07
  Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, good. So that is. Yeah. So not only in seventh grade, like, there had to be, like, zero frame of reference for the culture that you just entered.
• 3:21
  Speaker C: It was wild. It was. I mean, I had, like, a northeast accent at the time, and. Yeah, that eventually went away.
• 3:29
  Speaker B: My goodness. But so are your parents still there? Do you still call that home?
• 3:35
  Speaker C: Yep, still called that last weekend.
• 3:38
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 3:39
  Speaker A: My question. What. What brought what. Not going in too far into it, but why.
• 3:46
  Speaker C: Why'd we move?
• 3:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 3:47
  Speaker C: My dad's job. He worked for the federal government.
• 3:49
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 3:50
  Speaker C: And they said, you're gonna go here now. And so we did. Yeah.
• 3:53
  Speaker A: That's the way it usually works.
• 3:56
  Speaker B: I was trying to imagine that. I was like, well, I know there's some oil and gas in Pennsylvania, so maybe.
• 4:01
  Speaker C: No. No one in my. That's just me.
• 4:04
  Speaker B: Just you. Really?
• 4:06
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 4:06
  Speaker B: Interesting. And so you came to Tech because.
• 4:11
  Speaker C: Offered me the most scholarship money.
• 4:15
  Speaker A: That's the best way to pick. Exactly.
• 4:19
  Speaker B: Exactly. Right. So did you get your bachelor's and masters here?
• 4:23
  Speaker C: Yes, I did.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 4:24
  Speaker C: Yep. I stayed here. You're just a 100 red writer.
• 4:27
  Speaker B: That's awesome. Yeah.
• 4:29
  Speaker C: I've met my husband here, and.
• 4:31
  Speaker B: Great.
• 4:31
  Speaker C: We have a life here and stuff. So we're close enough to my family. So.
• 4:35
  Speaker B: Yeah. Lubbock's a pretty good place to settle.
• 4:37
  Speaker C: It is. It is.
• 4:38
  Speaker B: It's easy to get around, except on the.
• 4:40
  Speaker C: Except this.
• 4:41
  Speaker B: Except on the east side, where it's not.
• 4:43
  Speaker A: And game day. That's another.
• 4:46
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 4:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 4:46
  Speaker B: That's another hard day.
• 4:47
  Speaker A: I'm old enough now that it's like I'm one of the get off my lawn people now.
• 4:53
  Speaker C: I'm halfway there, honestly.
• 4:56
  Speaker A: But I'm kind of transitioning from. To get off my lawn to just take the lawn. I'll go somewhere else.
• 5:02
  Speaker B: Right.
• 5:02
  Speaker C: If you'll mow it.
• 5:03
  Speaker B: You can have it.
• 5:03
  Speaker A: There's four people here. That's three people too many. And I'm one of them.
• 5:08
  Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I, I really enjoyed listening to you talk. We, we. We talk about all kinds of things here. And it usually ends in water almost every time, so.
• 5:17
  Speaker A: Or complaining about the drought, which is water.
• 5:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So we try, we try not to complain all the time, but we do complain a lot. I think probably more than we should.
• 5:26
  Speaker C: I'm good at complaining.
• 5:27
  Speaker B: Okay, well, so
• 5:31
  Speaker C: we, you and I
• 5:31
  Speaker B: kind of went back and forth on like, a short email about what we would talk about and that kind of stuff. And so I sent that to Dusty, conveniently about five minutes before we started.
• 5:42
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 5:44
  Speaker B: Because we just always are off the cuff, so. Off the cuff. But I. What I found fascinating was that you're doing work in like, the impact that produced water has on varying stages of being cleaned and what that has on the soil. The impact that has on the soil because we not have. I don't know how many permits have been filed. I don't know. I've heard of three for sure, that are not like, rumors.
• 6:13
  Speaker C: I'm only familiar with with three.
• 6:15
  Speaker B: Okay. All right.
• 6:17
  Speaker C: So I don't know if they're still applications. They're not approved yet.
• 6:21
  Speaker B: Yeah. So. And who knows when that'll happen. But I know that there's some folks interested in Ply Lake putting, you know, some treated, produced water. And so.
• 6:32
  Speaker A: And now let. For people who.
• 6:34
  Speaker B: That's what I was going to say.
• 6:34
  Speaker A: Let's say treated, produced water. We don't mean that we added stuff to it. It means that it's actually been cleaned up.
• 6:41
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 6:41
  Speaker A: Is what treated, produced water. When you say treated, the first thing everybody thinks is, oh, what are they putting in my water?
• 6:49
  Speaker C: So we're talking about desalinization and polishing.
• 6:52
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 6:53
  Speaker B: And. And that's like a. Polishing people are like, how do you polish water?
• 6:57
  Speaker C: Yeah, Typically it's RO reverse osmosis. You could throw it through granulated activated carbon.
• 7:04
  Speaker B: But it's cleaning up everything that's left in there.
• 7:06
  Speaker C: Pretty much.
• 7:07
  Speaker B: Yes. Because you can get it basically to distilled water, which is what you found fast.
• 7:12
  Speaker C: Just about.
• 7:13
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So it's not kind of clean. It's almost too clean.
• 7:19
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 7:19
  Speaker C: I mean, I hate the word clean because as a chemist, it's like, you know.
• 7:23
  Speaker B: Right.
• 7:24
  Speaker C: What does that really mean? It's subjective. But the lack of ionic strength, the lack of salts in it, of cations in general. Yeah. Clean.
• 7:34
  Speaker A: And I covered every metal Chemistry that I remember from the two semesters I had to take. I understand, I remember cations, but.
• 7:44
  Speaker C: But that's what those are, the positively charged ions. Yes. Ca2 plus type thing. Yep.
• 7:49
  Speaker B: Yeah. So if you. Waters too, what I call clean, basically people can't survive on that. I mean we have to have the minerals and things that are in there.
• 7:57
  Speaker C: Right, right. Yeah. Human beings. Yeah. You can't. You go buy a jug of like the baby water for formulas that are just distilled water. If you drank that every day, you die. Like. Yeah, it messes with the osmosis aspect of your cells. They like salts. Your body needs salts. And I mean that's why we drink electrolytes.
• 8:15
  Speaker B: Right, right, right. And I think that's, I think something that I've seen in the last couple of years that's so interesting is people are beginning to realize that the minerals that we need. And I've even, I've even listened to some podcasts and heard some people talk about remineralizing the soil. So I was in a, I was at a, on a tour and Oklahoma a couple weeks ago and they had a. They'd taken a trailer and so the minerals that they were giving their animals were not in a solid block. They were separated out like a buffet, if you would, you know. And so, so those cattle were coming in there and peeking and choosing what they were eating. And the seven year project is what they were saying in hopes to. For that to reminisce, remineralize the soil.
• 9:05
  Speaker C: Interesting.
• 9:05
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I think they're three years in. So they said we don't really know much now, so.
• 9:10
  Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:11
  Speaker B: So be interesting to see how that helps. But I thought it was interesting too. Just dislike, not just assume that every cow needs the same thing, you know. So it was pretty cute. They taken an old U Haul trailer and it was really funny. It looks like something that you'd clean up and put at the K Bobs back in the day. Would have a salad bar on it or something. Was pretty funny. Pretty funny. So tell us a little bit about why. Why this research?
• 9:43
  Speaker C: Yeah, so like I said, I started my bachelor's in geosciences and that's, you know, mainly at tech. You're looking at geology and oil and gas extraction. And I kind of decided that wasn't necessarily the route for me. So I entered into soil chemistry because I think it's a little bit more interesting and it has more of a tangible impact on society. Because if you're just looking at it from the Research side of geology. It's very interesting to know like the history of the earth and what moved where and when, but what does that really do for the average person? You know, so in the realm of soil chemistry, environmental soil chemistry, that kind of spans both agriculture and what you typically think of with like environmental pollution and that kind of stuff. But then the Produced Water, Texas Produced Water Consortium started, I believe, in 2022. And we came on board about a year ago, we being the Plant and Soil Science Department. And this Produced Water consortium is kind of mandated by the legislator.
• 10:47
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 10:49
  Speaker C: Bunch of people got together and asked for a bunch of money from the state to do this research. And you know, related to the 2027 Texas Water Plan that was released a couple of weeks ago, a couple months ago. Maybe there's going to be a shortage of water.
• 11:04
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, we've known about that for a long time.
• 11:07
  Speaker C: And so this kind of, this research is kind of asking the question, rather than reallocating the water sources that we have right now, just moving stuff around, this is kind of looking at a new water source, if you will. But I want to reiterate, not for drinking, not for human consumption. I'm talking agriculture, I'm talking rangeland restoration, the playas, that kind of stuff.
• 11:29
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 11:30
  Speaker C: But.
• 11:30
  Speaker B: But it's also clean enough that environmentally it doesn't have a negative impact on the environment. In theory, it shouldn't. Theory. So. So do you have some concerns that, like. I, I don't know. I think, I think about it like data centers. I think part of the, part of the reason that people don't want them is that they don't trust the government to enforce the regulations. And I wonder if that's part of the, that that'll be part of the concern for Texans about produced water.
• 12:07
  Speaker C: Sure. And I mean, I think, you know, we've had, well, blowouts from the produced water where they. So typically they re. Inject it into the subsurface as a means of disposal because it's too expensive to treat, which, you know, it is expensive. Yeah. But as they kept doing that basically since we started fracking in the Permian, so like 2010. Ish. Those volumes have only increased.
• 12:32
  Speaker B: And, and we're bringing in the water from New Mexico because New Mexico, New Mexico, it's illegal. Yeah. You can't re.
• 12:38
  Speaker C: Inject it.
• 12:39
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 12:41
  Speaker C: So yeah, they bring it just over the border to Texas and reinject it here, which because of the oil and gas extraction, all the human activity out there, we've changed kind of the subsurface porosity, we've changed how much water it can hold. And so because of that, you're having a lot of buildup of pressure. Now if you do deep injection, which is going to be more deeper than like a mile or a kilometer and a half. Ish, you're getting kind of close to that Precambrian basement rock. And they have some already stressed faults. Right. Natural there. But if you keep increasing the pressure at that deep, deep level, you're going to induce seismicity.
• 13:20
  Speaker B: Right.
• 13:20
  Speaker C: And I mean, just the other day, yes, they had a pretty good earthquake out outside of Midland.
• 13:26
  Speaker B: Yeah, actually we've had several, but yeah, there was a pretty good one.
• 13:30
  Speaker A: Then they've actually. Because it was, you know, it was. There was. It was getting. There was getting to be quite a fair amount of seismic activity. And they raised. I think they shallowed. How.
• 13:38
  Speaker C: Yes. So in 2022, the Railroad Commission said, all right, limit your. Your deep injection. Let's go shallow, which is going to be less than a kilometer and a half, which.
• 13:47
  Speaker B: Which has raised. Which has raised the level of the Earth. The level of the Earth, literally.
• 13:53
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 13:53
  Speaker B: You can see it. You can see it at the New Mexico Texas line is pretty funny.
• 13:57
  Speaker A: That is. That is the wildest thing is that. That actually, I should say that sounds like. It's some. That sounds like something that you would hear back in the 90s at. On overnight AM radio using the level of the Earth.
• 14:12
  Speaker B: Right.
• 14:12
  Speaker A: Right along with the UFOs and Bigfoot.
• 14:16
  Speaker C: But as you, you know, increase that pressure, that raises the Earth. It can't do that forever.
• 14:21
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 14:22
  Speaker C: And so eventually that's gonna burst. And we've seen, well, blowouts. Tubbs Corner is a good example.
• 14:27
  Speaker B: That was Lake Craddock.
• 14:29
  Speaker C: Yeah. January of 25. I want to say it was.
• 14:33
  Speaker B: It wasn't long ago.
• 14:34
  Speaker C: And that was two solid weeks of.
• 14:36
  Speaker B: It was straight geyser. Yeah. Straight up poisonous gas.
• 14:40
  Speaker C: Yes. And that's not treated. Produced water.
• 14:43
  Speaker B: Right? That's right. That's just a straight up.
• 14:45
  Speaker C: That's straight toxic.
• 14:46
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 14:47
  Speaker C: Very, very salty. About five to seven times saltier than ocean water.
• 14:51
  Speaker B: Right. So. So the rumor I hear. Well, it's actually not a rumor. I heard it at the geologist conference. With the. Yeah. Geologist conference about how much salt. Like, if we cleaned all the salt out of all the water currently, we could fill the AT T stadium with salt like, oh, I believe every two weeks. Yeah, I believe that it's an. It's like an enormous amount.
• 15:19
  Speaker A: Everybody needs high blood pressure, use more salt.
• 15:21
  Speaker B: There you go. Unfortunately, it's not that kind of salt. So can you imagine, though, like, just the. I, I, when I think about that, I think about, like, what do you, would you do? Put that, like, you know, of course the idea is not to take it down to that. You, you still have like a slurry of that that you're still going to inject.
• 15:40
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 15:40
  Speaker B: And so it's going to be a much smaller volume. It's going to be way, way smaller. Yeah. Right. And then what you have left over, you know, the big question is, where's it going to go? And that's what you looked at is like, okay, what happens if we put it on.
• 15:54
  Speaker C: Right.
• 15:55
  Speaker B: On rangeland or crop land?
• 15:57
  Speaker A: Right.
• 15:57
  Speaker C: So I'm looking specifically at the soil chemistry. I'm not a plant person. I've killed every plant I've ever owned. So this was without plants. This was in the laboratory. I built these columns that were about 8 inches tall by 2 inches wide and filled them with local agricultural soil from the Quaker Research farm owned by Tech, which is pretty representative of the soil that we have out here, and applied a bunch of water to it at different stages of treatment. And then as well as locally sourced groundwater that we typically use for irrigation. And you know, if you just pour one watering can worth of water on the soil, you're not really going to change much. So I was hope. I was wanting to simulate multiple seasons of irrigation. And so in terms of quantity of water, I applied five seasons worth of cotton, irrigation, upland cotton, you know, the amount that we would normally use. Yep. And then also 10 seasons.
• 16:54
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 16:55
  Speaker C: And I did this with desalinated, unpolished produced water. Desalinated, intermediately polished produced water. And then that final. Totally polished, totally desalinated produced water. And then, and then the groundwater.
• 17:06
  Speaker B: Yeah. So basically saline water or not saline. I'm sorry, distilled water. Pretty much.
• 17:11
  Speaker C: Pretty much, yeah. Yeah.
• 17:12
  Speaker B: Right. So fully desalinated and then desalinated and polished. Say it again. It's four categories.
• 17:22
  Speaker C: Yeah. So we have the groundwater. Desalinated, unpolished.
• 17:26
  Speaker B: Unpolished.
• 17:26
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 17:27
  Speaker C: Only removing the salt.
• 17:28
  Speaker B: Okay. Right.
• 17:28
  Speaker C: Desalinated, intermediately polished. So like totally desalinated but kind of polished.
• 17:34
  Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
• 17:35
  Speaker C: Kind of like that intermediate step.
• 17:36
  Speaker B: So remove some of the.
• 17:38
  Speaker C: Yes. And then fully polished. Fully desalinated.
• 17:41
  Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Because to me, I think leaving some of that in there for, I mean, because some of that's beneficial for the soil. So. So let's talk about your results.
• 17:54
  Speaker C: So I applied these at a gravimetric rate, so.
• 17:59
  Speaker B: And that's a wawa.
• 18:01
  Speaker C: And that is like the rate that the water naturally percolates down into the soil. Right. So I'm not forcing it through. I'm just letting. It.
• 18:09
  Speaker B: As in. As in the word gravity.
• 18:11
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 18:12
  Speaker B: Gravimetric.
• 18:13
  Speaker C: Gravimetric.
• 18:14
  Speaker A: Wow.
• 18:14
  Speaker B: Okay. I have a. We'll see if I can use that one in a sentence next week.
• 18:18
  Speaker A: I won't remember it next week. I'll sleep between.
• 18:22
  Speaker C: Now. So.
• 18:22
  Speaker B: So you aren't forcing it down there, you're just letting it percolate. Okay.
• 18:26
  Speaker C: And I'll. I'll start with kind of the characterization of the water itself.
• 18:33
  Speaker B: Oh, that's a great idea.
• 18:34
  Speaker C: So, yeah, the groundwater, you know, pH about 7.4. Very little ammonia in it, very little organic carbon in it, and a whole lot of calcium, sodium, magnesium, inorganic carbon. Because.
• 18:48
  Speaker A: Sounds like groundwater.
• 18:49
  Speaker C: Sounds like groundwater. Y' all know the. What happens to your shower heads and your faucets with the ground?
• 18:54
  Speaker B: That's a. There's many here. A town without a toothache because they sing.
• 18:59
  Speaker C: And then the desalinated, unpolished water that had a pretty high pH, that was about 9.7, and it also had about 100 milligrams of liter per liter of ammonia. So it's got quite a bit of inorganic nitrogen in there. And then it also had a good amount of organic carbon, about 58 milligrams per liter. So much higher than the groundwater. Right. The incompletely polished produced water. So desalinated, intermediately polished produced water, this had also a high ph of about 8.9. Same amount of ammonia, but very little organic carbon. So that intermediate process, they. They removed the salt, Right?
• 19:36
  Speaker B: Right.
• 19:36
  Speaker C: They removed all of the organic carbon just about, but somehow left the ammonia in there.
• 19:42
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 19:43
  Speaker C: So lots and lots of inorganic nitrogen, very little organic carbon. And then the polished, desalinated produced water that actually had a low ph of 5.6 and had very little ammonia, very little organic carbon, and little salts as well that had the lowest electric conductivities, lowest amount of salt.
• 20:02
  Speaker A: We got to remember where we are, because I'm going to ask a question that risks driving us completely off the rails. But why is the PH so high and so low in that?
• 20:12
  Speaker C: Which solid question? So when you initially raise that pH, that helps to precipitate out some of what you're trying to remove, but the lower ph. You know, I wasn't the one who treated this water. I'm not the water engineer. It's proprietary, probably. I don't even. I don't know. They just gave me what they gave Me and I. This is what I found.
• 20:41
  Speaker B: Right.
• 20:42
  Speaker A: So.
• 20:42
  Speaker C: Yeah. I don't have an explanation for that. You'd have to ask the. The companies that actually.
• 20:47
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 20:47
  Speaker A: So that the high ph water. I mean, I'm running through like, I do grow things. I try to randomly actually, I try to figure things. Yeah.
• 20:59
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 20:59
  Speaker A: But my, My. I have a degree in agronomy from tech, and so I had soils and that kind of stuff. You know, when I look at the ph of my. My irrigation water being. It's pretty comparable to what you're doing. What you were on the groundwater there. And, And I can see what happens because with a vineyard, unlike when I was doing row crops, you see the effects of it more concentrated in time because you're running a drip line right underneath. Underneath the trellis there. So it's, you know, what you're seeing is a foot either side of the vine is where you see the immediate visible effects of long term groundwater applications in one side.
• 21:41
  Speaker C: Right.
• 21:42
  Speaker A: Because it doesn't look like. Unlike a pivot where it goes like, you know, where you may see something, but then you run a disc over and break and plow. And you plow it under. You don't see it anymore. You can see that. So I can see that the buildup from the calcium and all the stuff that's in our. In our groundwater.
• 21:55
  Speaker C: Right.
• 21:56
  Speaker A: And I also watch. You can also track the ph of the soil going up as you're adding that.
• 22:00
  Speaker C: Exactly.
• 22:01
  Speaker A: More of that stuff to that thing. And I might, you know, so when I sit here. Here. Hey, what was the first one? Nine. Phone.
• 22:07
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 22:08
  Speaker C: About 9.7.
• 22:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. Like that about gives me a stroke.
• 22:12
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 22:13
  Speaker A: Oh, my God. And then you hear five and you're like. And which is the same. I mean, it's. That's big. That's. That's a swing either way. I mean, it's pretty much that. It's pretty much a swing. The same swing.
• 22:22
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 22:22
  Speaker A: Either side of neutral.
• 22:23
  Speaker C: And you got to remember the scale is a log scale.
• 22:26
  Speaker A: It's a log scale.
• 22:27
  Speaker C: Logarithmic. So we're having orders of magnitude difference here.
• 22:30
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 22:30
  Speaker B: Wow.
• 22:31
  Speaker A: And so like, hey. That we could drop. She could. If you could put that out there and you could drop it. We could plant BlackBerry or blueberries rather well.
• 22:38
  Speaker B: And that's been part of the. That's what I've wondered about this water.
• 22:43
  Speaker A: You've answered my question with.
• 22:44
  Speaker B: Go back on. So that's a whole nother. That's a whole nother rabbit.
• 22:48
  Speaker A: I'll have to get the people that provided you the water.
• 22:50
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 22:51
  Speaker A: So go ahead and go with your.
• 22:52
  Speaker C: So exactly. You observe the PH of your soil going up with high ph irrigation water. I saw the exact same thing. So I saw under the desalinated, unpolished and desalinated intermediately polished produced water that raised the soil PH higher than what it originally was and vice versa. The polished, desalinated produced water with that low ph brought the soil ph down, not drastically, because our soils have a buffering capacity.
• 23:17
  Speaker B: Right.
• 23:17
  Speaker C: There's other stuff in them, but it was noticeable. It was statistically noticeable in both the
• 23:22
  Speaker B: five year and the more so the ten. Okay.
• 23:25
  Speaker C: Because initially that buffering capacity can kind of hang on for a minute as you keep going.
• 23:29
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:30
  Speaker C: You know, you strip it out.
• 23:31
  Speaker B: Right.
• 23:32
  Speaker C: And so because of that, because of the changes in the soil ph, you therefore have changes to soil nutrients, that kind of stuff. So think about, think about calcium, Think about gypsum. That's going to be an alkaline mineral. Right. That's very low solubility at a high ph. But when you drop that ph, you solubilize it, it becomes more mobile and it can therefore leave the system.
• 23:57
  Speaker B: So what you shouldn't assume is that I know anything that you're talking about.
• 24:00
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 24:02
  Speaker B: So Dusty. Well, Dusty's had the classes.
• 24:04
  Speaker A: I have not followed every bit of that.
• 24:06
  Speaker C: That's what I'm talking about. So.
• 24:07
  Speaker B: So I'm gonna need people to call in so they can, they can sympathize with me. Be like, I don't know what you're talking about.
• 24:16
  Speaker C: I'm trying. I've been working on science communication skills for a long time.
• 24:21
  Speaker B: You're doing pretty good. You're doing pretty good.
• 24:23
  Speaker A: When you see the, the PH change like you're talking about new, it's obviously you get a different range of nutrients that are available as ph changes throughout the soil.
• 24:31
  Speaker C: Correct.
• 24:32
  Speaker A: And so our typical high ph we typically have zinc and iron are the two that are that, that we have to worry about the most because they're most inside, most unavailable at that. If you drop the PH down, you could actually have the flip side of it happen where you have zinc toxicity.
• 24:51
  Speaker C: Right.
• 24:51
  Speaker A: You can get, you can get it where you've got because it's too mobile, way too much of it, you know, and, you know, how is it that we had to put it on to keep this, you know, to make sure everything pollinated properly, and now all of a sudden we have to do something to try to keep killing the plant.
• 25:03
  Speaker C: So plants are going to absorb nutrients solely through the roots and solely in the aqueous form, in that liquid form. So if it's insoluble, the plant can't see it, it can't take it up. So a good example in West Texas would be phosphorus. Do you have a phosphorus problem?
• 25:20
  Speaker A: Most. Yeah.
• 25:21
  Speaker C: Yeah, Most people do. And that's because our high ph of the soil, our phosphorus is often, often complexed with calcium. So you have these calcium phosphates, which is kind of what our teeth are made of, you know?
• 25:33
  Speaker B: Yes. This is why we don't have a toothache.
• 25:35
  Speaker C: Yes. And so because the ph is high in the soil, that calcium complexes with the phosphorus. Phosphorus isn't in the soil solution. Plants can't see it. Plants don't get it. That's why you're applying phosphorus fertilizer. Right. If you lower the soil ph, you increase the solubility of these calcium phosphates, and then the plants can see it. Yeah.
• 25:59
  Speaker A: That's probably the best way I've ever heard anybody explain nutrient uptake. The plant can see it or not see it.
• 26:05
  Speaker B: Right.
• 26:07
  Speaker A: Well done so well.
• 26:08
  Speaker C: And.
• 26:08
  Speaker B: And I would have a few years ago gone, what? But do they see. But they know it's there. They can take it up because it's in a liquid.
• 26:15
  Speaker C: Yes, it is in liquid form. And the roots are able to slurp that up. Right. But what if the phosphorus is so mobile and you get a decent rainfall, you do, you know, a bunch of irrigation all of a sudden, and you get runoff. Where does that phosphorus go? Yeah, a lot of times it's going to go into the surrounding water bodies.
• 26:34
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 26:34
  Speaker C: And then you're going to get eutrophication, which is going to be the phosphorus in that water, the microalgae, all of those organisms, they love it.
• 26:42
  Speaker B: Right.
• 26:43
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 26:43
  Speaker C: Fertilizer is fertilizer for any organism.
• 26:46
  Speaker A: Isn't phosphorus what we typically cause? The algae blooms.
• 26:49
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 26:49
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 26:50
  Speaker C: Correct. Yeah. Some people say nitrogen and phosphorus, but main culprit is phosphorus.
• 26:55
  Speaker A: Usually there's enough nitrogen available that when the phosphorus hits, phosphorus hits it. Phosphorus is the limiting mineral or limiting factor. Limiting factor in that thing. You dump it in there and.
• 27:06
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 27:07
  Speaker A: That was my sound effect for the day.
• 27:12
  Speaker C: And then so the algae blooms, and then it dies eventually. And the microorganisms in the water that are decomposing, that do so by utilizing oxygen, they're more. To put it simply, they're breathing the oxygen to decompose all of this organic matter of the dead algae, and then that removes the oxygen from the water, and then the fish can't breathe and then.
• 27:37
  Speaker B: Wow. Wow.
• 27:38
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 27:40
  Speaker B: No, I like, I'm so excited about this just because I'm weird. But I, I was on a call several months ago talking about what they're doing like in Washington, Oregon, up in there where the farmers have just been watering with runoff. I mean just there have been flood watering and they're changing all that up so that they don't have the runoff anym that's been creating these algae blooms that's been destroying the fish. And now I understand like. Oh, okay.
• 28:11
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's.
• 28:11
  Speaker B: I understand why. I understand chemically now why that's happening.
• 28:15
  Speaker A: It's the same principle as, as why you have so much nitrogen in the water in Iowa is runoff. It's just we're talking about phosphorus.
• 28:23
  Speaker C: Right.
• 28:24
  Speaker A: You've got an overabundance of nitrogen over. You know.
• 28:27
  Speaker B: Right.
• 28:27
  Speaker A: I dream of the day that I could say we have an overabundance of rainfall. Yeah, me too. You know, that's.
• 28:33
  Speaker B: I'm not sure that's going to happen in many places anymore.
• 28:36
  Speaker A: No, no, that's.
• 28:36
  Speaker B: That's a few places.
• 28:37
  Speaker A: I listened to a guy. They said they were discussing climate changes.
• 28:41
  Speaker B: Unfortunately it's going to happen too often. Trenches.
• 28:44
  Speaker A: They said Iowa. Their. The average rainfall in Iowa is actually increased. Well, so it's like they're stealing our water.
• 28:51
  Speaker B: What I, what I understand is that like because of the rise in temperature, what happens is that the water molecules stay in the air longer so that you get more harder rains than you do the smaller incremental rains. So that's what I'm hearing from the.
• 29:12
  Speaker A: I mean it was interesting. I was listening. The guy was listening to. Had done a pretty substantial amount of research on it and he was talking. It was a professor out. Where was he? A professor out of Iowa State.
• 29:24
  Speaker B: Interesting. Okay.
• 29:25
  Speaker A: And he was doing research that. I'm not going. I wonder if he's working with the NASA people because he was looking at using satellites for soil and water book content.
• 29:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, they're doing a lot. They do a lot of work there.
• 29:37
  Speaker A: In soil and plants.
• 29:39
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 29:39
  Speaker A: Not solid water.
• 29:40
  Speaker B: They do a lot of work with the corn growers all through their.
• 29:43
  Speaker A: Corn growers are.
• 29:44
  Speaker B: One of them did.
• 29:44
  Speaker A: But it was.
• 29:45
  Speaker B: Sorry, this is one of our partners.
• 29:48
  Speaker A: This is how we talk. You know, we just.
• 29:51
  Speaker C: But I mean, you know, farming Iowa, agriculture, all that. That main watershed that all of the runoff goes down into is going to be the Mississippi.
• 29:59
  Speaker B: That's right. That's why there's the.
• 30:01
  Speaker C: And then you go down to the Gulf and You keep building and building and building up and all of these nutrients call it nutrient pollution. And then it dumps into the Gulf where it's nice and warm and the algae goes nuts and all of a
• 30:14
  Speaker A: sudden you don't have shrimp and so
• 30:15
  Speaker C: on and so forth. Yep, exactly. Exactly.
• 30:17
  Speaker B: Isn't it amazing? Like you just see how much more that, what the butterfly effect of like how, how. So closely
• 30:28
  Speaker A: he was talking, he actually talked the podcast that scientists out of. I always had actually talked about the butterfly effect a lot because he was, he was talking about the models, the, the atmospheric models that they made and they were trying to do research. He said, the problem we run into with the atmospheric models, he said so he said I can do this model and it's really complex and it's really amazing. And you look at it, this is incredible. And then you realize it really doesn't mean anything because I can't actually translate it to the real world. He said it's kind of the way he explained it was it's like building a city out of Legos versus building a city in real life. He said, you build a LEGO city, you can just sell this and doesn't go here, I'm gonna take this building off and move it over here. He said, you really can't do that when you build a city. But anyway, we've chased that rabbit far enough. So the question I had to ask when you're talking about the, the soil ph going to. Have you seen it? And I'm going to pull my, my fun. The, my one soil word that I remember. Does it change the til. The, so the, the soil til as far as like the structure and density of the soil as you go through it. Because I, I'm assuming you're, I'm assuming you're working in the, the A horizon, the top.
• 31:38
  Speaker C: Well, so I'm not working in the field. Right, right. But yeah, it was about the top 8 inches or so that I pulled from. I think you'd have to do a much longer term study to actually observe the changes because, you know, I'm simulating five and 10 seasons, but I can't, you know, actually time travel or anything like that. So in reality it's about 10 days and 21 days worth of continuous irrigation. So at that time scale you wouldn't see that. But changes in like the hydraulic conductivity, how the water moves through the soil because of the changes in the structure, definitely something we're going to look into.
• 32:14
  Speaker B: Wow. So there was a lot of talk because you, you spoke Right. After our panel spoke on rangeland restoration, like using the water for rangeland restoration. And so what stuck out to me was this, you know how detrimental it is to use that water, that completely clean water.
• 32:40
  Speaker C: Right.
• 32:40
  Speaker B: It would just strip by itself.
• 32:42
  Speaker C: By itself, by itself and continuously.
• 32:45
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 32:45
  Speaker C: So in a rangeland situation, if you were able to just apply it every now and then to make up for drought conditions and stuff like that, I don't necessarily know, you'd see an extreme change like I did in my controlled study, because, you know, I didn't have evaporation, I didn't have plant uptake.
• 33:03
  Speaker B: Right, right, right.
• 33:04
  Speaker C: So there's, you know, we do need to move on to field trials, which we are.
• 33:09
  Speaker A: You're also going to have some minerals that get into the water as it falls on plants and runs down the plants. You're going to get some minerals off. That's going to be. Because Lord knows there's enough sand on most of the grass around here that it's going to pick up something in there.
• 33:23
  Speaker C: Right, right. But then you, you know, you think of it from the nutrient perspective, but then you can also think of it from the microbial perspective because the microbes in the soil, the bacteria, all of that, they're the ones cycling these nutrients. They're the ones kind of really keeping the engine running in the, in the quality and the fertility of the soil. And I saw differences in the microbial stuff too.
• 33:43
  Speaker B: So microbes was the word of the year for me in 2023.
• 33:47
  Speaker C: Nice.
• 33:47
  Speaker B: It's because I'm weird. Most other women were like, my word is joy, mine is microbes.
• 33:54
  Speaker C: I'm with you.
• 33:55
  Speaker B: I love microbes. I have this amazing fascination with.
• 33:59
  Speaker C: They are very interesting.
• 34:00
  Speaker B: They are so interesting.
• 34:02
  Speaker A: So when you, when you say you saw an impact, did you see a positive impact or a negative impact?
• 34:09
  Speaker C: I'm going to say negative. But I don't like being, you know, black and white about it. Things.
• 34:14
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 34:15
  Speaker C: You know, this isn't a end all, be all. You know, this is never, ever going to change. I reserve the right to change my opinion. And you do too.
• 34:22
  Speaker B: It's science.
• 34:23
  Speaker C: It's ongoing and it's ongoing. But what I saw in my study is, so remember, talk about the polished, desalinated produced water, the super clean stuff, the final product. I said there was very little nitrogen and very little organic carbon in it.
• 34:37
  Speaker A: Right.
• 34:38
  Speaker C: Microbes, just like plants and just like us, would like to consume nitrogen and carbon. They want to mineralize it. They want to. That's their energy source. And so because of that lack of mainly carbon in the polished, desalinated, produced water, that those microbes are going to look for that organic carbon elsewhere. And they're going to do that by taking soil organic carbon, native soil organic
• 35:03
  Speaker B: carbon they're going to consume of which
• 35:06
  Speaker C: we got very little.
• 35:07
  Speaker A: But the thing about it is, if you were to put that into a system where you. In my system, I don't mean like an irrigation system, I mean like a whole total farm management system where you knew, okay, my water does not have X and Y. And then, then search is how do I put X and Y into my water so that when it hits the soil.
• 35:29
  Speaker B: Right.
• 35:29
  Speaker A: I've got it in there.
• 35:30
  Speaker C: Yeah. And that's totally an option.
• 35:32
  Speaker A: There's thousands of ways you can do that. We could go back to the old collector tank model and you just inject it into it and it goes in the collector tank. Everything kind of settles out there. It's constantly injected into that or it goes, you know, you inject it straight into the pivot in that point and then you can dose it to whatever you want at that point. You can close it to what would be the exact amount that you need.
• 35:52
  Speaker C: Yes. You can do your, you can take a sample of your soil, send it to a third party soil testing lab. They'll say you're low on this, this and this, add that into your irrigation water just like you would.
• 36:04
  Speaker A: And once again, adding things back into water is something that virtually every farmer knows how to do.
• 36:10
  Speaker C: Yes. And it is a lot easier than to selectively take things out and leave other stuff in. It's a lot easier, yes, engineering wise, to just remove everything and then add back in what you do want.
• 36:20
  Speaker B: Right?
• 36:21
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:21
  Speaker C: Than to try to pick and choose.
• 36:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. And it allows, you know, and it allows you, it allows you the opportunity to get it in closer to the exact amount that you need rather than just going out there and saying and crossing your fingers, we're going to slam this thing out there and we're gonna, I think it needs this much, so we're going to double it just to make sure it has enough.
• 36:39
  Speaker B: Right?
• 36:40
  Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, wait, that's.
• 36:41
  Speaker C: Which, when you do that, that, where does it go? It runs off.
• 36:44
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:45
  Speaker C: Plants can't take up everything if you apply a ton and then it's gonna water bodies and.
• 36:49
  Speaker B: Right.
• 36:50
  Speaker A: Have you seen, have you, have you seen that? You know, we've, you, we talked about the, the phosphorus going in. I'm talking about, I always get my P's and K's mixed Up. But talking about the phosphorus going into the, into the Playa lakes, have you trapped it? Did you check the water that came out of it and take and see how much of that was.
• 37:07
  Speaker C: Yeah. So I had in my columns, at the end of it, it was hooked up to a fraction collector and it would at, you know, I would say, you know, half an hour after I start, an hour, two hour, four hour, all the way up to like 100 hours, collecting a little bit of the effluent every time. And then I can run that on the instruments we have in the lab and I can see what's coming out. And indeed the phosphorus is coming out, but again, there's no plants to take it up.
• 37:35
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 37:36
  Speaker A: But I mean, it still proves the hypothesis that it's going to come out.
• 37:42
  Speaker C: Yes, it does.
• 37:42
  Speaker A: And so, hey, so, I mean, that puts us a big step ahead because we'll say, hey, this is going to be a potential problem. We have this. And so now you can say, okay, how can we fix this? Well, the next thing is we have to get it on something that's actually growing and see how much does it. How much of it is consumed by. Before it goes anywhere.
• 38:01
  Speaker C: And it's a heck of a lot easier to identify these problems in the lab.
• 38:06
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 38:06
  Speaker C: Indoors rather than buy a whole lot outside where you really don't have any real.
• 38:11
  Speaker B: Well, and also. Yeah. Right. And then you're like, whoops,
• 38:15
  Speaker A: if you have an unintended consequence, I'd rather have it occur in a lab.
• 38:19
  Speaker B: Right. Well, and you know, the interesting thing about, like, if you, you put it into, say you put it into the. Maybe not directly into the playa, but if you've restored the grassland around that playa and you kind of put it in the watershed that runs into the playa, then it's going to get filtered as it goes towards the water to play it, and then the playa will filter it more before it gets to the aquifer. So then you could be like, to what level do we polish it and clean it and then allow the aquifer to do its job?
• 38:49
  Speaker A: That's what I need to do. Next thing you need to do is get enough of it to get on the circle system, run it on that, some on one that TAV and Datsun Conduction limited has already got established.
• 39:01
  Speaker B: Well, I think there are applications for permits put out there, but until we get a permit, we can't. Which I appreciate the fact that they're wanting to. You know, I don't really know what's holding it up the permitting side, like, if they haven't decided, like, to me, I'm like, we have clean. We have a thing called like safe water standard. Like, you know what I mean? Like, we have the safe water act. Like we know what is safe. It's not like we don't know well, and we've identified the constituents and lift. Unless there's still some concern that we might not have found all the unknowns.
• 39:39
  Speaker C: So with produced water, in case you can't.
• 39:42
  Speaker A: In case you're just listening. She was shaking your head, nodding her head vigorously. On that one.
• 39:46
  Speaker C: It is, it's coming out of oil and gas oper. So it's not entirely natural. You're going to have chemicals, you're going to have stuff that the oil and gas companies are putting in the water. You know, to do the hydro fracturing of the rock to get the oil out. They got to put stuff in there to protect their own pipes, Corrosion inhibitors, biocides to kill off, you know, bacteria that'll grow in there. So you have to remove that as well. And they are. I don't want to get ahead of myself. I am an inorganic chemist. So this. Now we're kind of leaning into the organic chemistry side of things. So you have to also consider those types of unnatural chemicals that have been added to it.
• 40:30
  Speaker B: So is it the addition of those chemicals or is it what is actually mixed in with the oil and gas naturally, which is the larger part of the. I wouldn't say contamination, but like, do you know what I'm saying? So, like, what's coming up out of that shell with. It's. I mean, it's, it's just like this is petroleum water, basically. You know. So I, I always think about, like when I think about it, I think about what you get if you put cooking oil and then you pour water on the top of it. You know what I mean? Like that to me. And you're still going to have. Looks like you wouldn't like reach over and just drink that and go, oh, this is going to taste like. Yeah, no. And so that's why picture produced water as like. But it also has these things that they're using in order to frack.
• 41:20
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 41:21
  Speaker B: So.
• 41:21
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 41:21
  Speaker B: In the water. Okay.
• 41:23
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 41:23
  Speaker B: So it's two. It's two sources of.
• 41:26
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 41:26
  Speaker B: Contamination, quote, unquote. Right.
• 41:29
  Speaker C: And I will say, you know, I'm not a microbiologist either, but I worked with the microbiologist at Tech and she was able to do some analyses of the soil from the microbial Aspect and, and we looked at a gene expression that microbes will release when they're dealing with a type of hydrocarbons. PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, probably a bit much. But that's a type of hydrocarbon, right?
• 41:54
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 41:55
  Speaker C: And we didn't see any effect of that. So it looks like at least that type of hydrocarbon is successfully being removed.
• 42:02
  Speaker B: Interesting. But. And you know, I don't know, someone tell me one time, like there for everything in the world, there's a microbe that will eat it.
• 42:08
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 42:09
  Speaker B: And I've wondered about that like, form of. I have a. My, my word. Micro came from a friend of mine who I've tried to get her on them. She's just too busy. She's too busy. But she was the first person to write about endophytes. So the microbes like implants and actually was kind of blackballed for many years because no one believed that they were there. And so it's, it's super interesting. Like when she did finished her first work, she was like, you know, basically we can train farmers if we know what microbes they need to grow their own microbes. And they could actually do a lot of this application work or things that they need done on their farm themselves without having to actually.
• 42:59
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 42:59
  Speaker B: Spend a lot of money on chemicals. You know what I mean? And so that didn't go over well.
• 43:05
  Speaker C: There's a lot we don't know about the microbial soils.
• 43:08
  Speaker B: She said, she said I could spend my whole life on like one microbe and not know everything.
• 43:14
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 43:14
  Speaker B: That's how complex they are.
• 43:16
  Speaker A: I've always.
• 43:16
  Speaker B: And we think we are complex.
• 43:19
  Speaker A: Well, single cell organism versus how many trillions of cells we get. So. But I've always wondered, you know that doctor, like you said, there's some. That for everything out there, there's a microbe that'll. That'll eat it. I'm like, well that means there's, you know, because I first heard about it in radioactivity. Like when kids find the microbe and like. Well, that doesn't get rid of the radioactivity, it just moves it to a different microbe. How does that. You've got it.
• 43:45
  Speaker C: But it could be easier to remove it. To remove the microbe then.
• 43:49
  Speaker B: Right. Or the microbe. Or the microbe digest it. And then the way they digest it and they are pooping it out to say, so to speak, in a different form.
• 43:59
  Speaker A: It's what we do with wine all the time.
• 44:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yes. You put microbes in there that's right. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. And microbes are amazing.
• 44:09
  Speaker C: So the other kind of switch topics.
• 44:10
  Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
• 44:11
  Speaker C: The other thing I want to talk about is boron. Boron, this is b on the periodic table and it doesn't get talked about a lot of. But boron is a micronutrient to plants. They need it in teeny tiny amounts. You know, they don't need it as much as they need phosphorus and nitrogen, but they still need it. But there's also a fine line between necessity and toxicity.
• 44:34
  Speaker A: Okay, very fine line.
• 44:36
  Speaker C: Very fine line. Yes. That line for cotton. I've read papers, you know, this isn't a dead fact, but what I've read is that's about 5 ppm, that's about 5 milligrams of boron per kilogram of soil is going to be toxic to upland cotton specifically.
• 44:53
  Speaker A: It's lower than that in peanuts, I can tell you for a fact.
• 44:56
  Speaker B: Okay, wow.
• 44:58
  Speaker A: So I don't know what it is. I just know that peanuts are a lot more intolerant of boron toxicity.
• 45:04
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah, Totally. Depends on the crop. It depends on, you know, the cultivar you're using, even like. Yeah, but it's, it's a bit of an. Boron's a bit of an issue in produced water treatment because it's in a neutral state. So it's not positively charged or negatively charged at the relevant pHs, it's neutral. And so your reverse osmosis, your ion exchange processes kind of depend on that charge. And so if it's neutral, it kind of just slips by.
• 45:32
  Speaker B: Oh my gosh.
• 45:34
  Speaker C: And so because of that, you can have, you know, some boron in there that builds up a little bit because you keep treating it and treating it and you're removing everything else but the boron. Yeah, that's going to have a concentration effect.
• 45:46
  Speaker B: Right.
• 45:47
  Speaker C: And I'm not talking to crazy levels, but it's still there. And when you apply that to the soil, it can stick to the soil, it can stay in there, it can accumulate in the soil. And so I observed the desalinated, unpolished produced water. So kind of the dirtiest produced water, if you will, not raw, but minimally treated, that had the highest amount of boron in it, about half a milliliter or a milligram per liter. Not a lot, but it accumulated in the soil and it got up to 5 milligrams per kilogram at that simulated 10 year mark. 10 season mark. This is probably related to the high PH of that one because the high ph is Going to allow the boron to stick around a little bit more. So I didn't see that in the polished desalinated produced water, but the polished desalinated produced water, that fully treated one actually had the most boron in it. But it didn't necessarily accumulate because it was counteracted by the low ph. But if you raise the PH of that polished desalinated produced water, which you would have to.
• 47:00
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 47:01
  Speaker C: In West Texas at least.
• 47:03
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 47:04
  Speaker C: I could see the boron accumulating to a. To a problem level.
• 47:08
  Speaker B: Yeah. Good grief.
• 47:11
  Speaker C: So this isn't the only treatment. You know, we're not done treating it. We can still come up with other ideas. And that's what this research is for, is to kind of inform the next iteration of treatment.
• 47:22
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 47:23
  Speaker C: Before we say, okay, this is it.
• 47:24
  Speaker B: Right.
• 47:25
  Speaker A: You could, I mean, might theoretically be possible to blend a small amount of normal groundwater with it to make the V8 that make the boron become. Some have some sort of a charge to it. Maybe. I don't know.
• 47:40
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 47:40
  Speaker A: I mean, I have no idea. That's. That, that's, you know, you're talking about exchanges and crap like that, and I don't. That goes over my head in a hurry.
• 47:49
  Speaker B: But that's the kind of stuff that, like I was talking yesterday to somebody about the, the narrative around produce water and how do we, how do we be, you know, we need to be honest. But we don't want to scare people. We also don't want to people to scare people just in order to like keep something from happening that could be good, you know what I'm saying? Because what I've encountered in the produce water world is you kind of have
• 48:24
  Speaker A: most.
• 48:24
  Speaker B: I would say 99% of the people that I've met are like, when it's safe, we need to use it. And then there are some people who are like, this is a great way to end fossil fuel productions. Let's just say you can't keep producing because you're causing earthquakes. And it's doing this and it's doing this and it's doing this, you know. And I think that is completely unnecessary and unrealistic, you know. So, yes, I run a conservation nonprofit. We are a very strange one, I guess. But I think, we think in terms of people plan a profit, like you can't continue to harm the environment without it eventually harming people. And.
• 49:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 49:06
  Speaker B: And economics, you know what I mean? And so now we're in this position. This is a perfect example to me of how you have to figure out how to create a solution?
• 49:16
  Speaker A: Well, I mean the thing about the solution may be, hey, we now have access to water that we haven't had before. Let's grow a different crop that uses.
• 49:24
  Speaker B: Okay, so that could be. And here's what I say about that, though I don't really know that many philanthropic folks in the. I mean, I'm sorry, I know, I mean to me, like, I think you could, maybe you could find some really high value crops to do with some of this water. And that might be. I mean, I know the last, the last statistics I looked at is if we took all the water right now and used it, we would be. We could replace about a quarter of the water that we're using on the high plains. But you think about getting it where it's going to go and in the economics of that kind of system or even the economics of like rangeland restoration. So if an oil and gas company is not going to say what is the best use of this water for the good of humanity?
• 50:18
  Speaker A: Well, they have a history of doing that. I mean,
• 50:22
  Speaker B: well, and, and hey, let's just say this too. I mean people would die without fossil fuels. If you turn fossil fuels off right now, people would die and so collapse.
• 50:30
  Speaker A: Hey, yeah, well, and people, Europe this year, I mean they've got, people have to have electrician, you know, in the, in the, you know, they're chasing net 0 and there's 20 something thousand people died in Europe from heat.
• 50:43
  Speaker B: Well, honey, they don't have air conditioners
• 50:45
  Speaker A: because they don't like they can't run
• 50:47
  Speaker B: electricity because they just, they've not.
• 50:49
  Speaker C: Their buildings are built for.
• 50:51
  Speaker B: But not this other that that's right there. I mean, let me just tell you, being in Poland, like you just like there's, there's a few days you need it. It's like going to Ridosa and getting a cabin where somebody's like, it's not worth having an air conditioner. And I have stayed in such a cabin. Let me tell you, if you have a cabin in Raidosa, it is always worth an air conditioner. Always. Not staying there before. Let me know if you need a not place not to stay.
• 51:14
  Speaker C: I think, I think my most American quality is that I need air conditioning at all.
• 51:18
  Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. It was a huge forget heat wave too. Food just keep me cool.
• 51:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, air conditioner. Basically. Like I, I came home, I was down to the farm early, early this morning and met my pastor buddy to shoot some clay pigeons and thought, well, I'm gonna go home, take a shower and show up, go to the radio show and got home and I had no electricity. Me and 3200 of my closest friends don't have electricity over there. And I guess I could take a cold shower, but you just take a
• 51:49
  Speaker B: fast, take a, take a fast shower before all your water runs out of. Your water. Runs out of your water heater. Yeah, I don't know. I, I am. I think it's, it's very complicated and, and creating, you know, that's one reason why we, we try to. We've had Shane Walker on before and, and I keep trying to get Eric Bernard to come on here. If you're listening, I'm trying to get a hold of you, you know, because a lot of the ideas for rangeland restoration, I think, are great ideas. Ultimately, what's better for the environment and maybe even for the diversification of an economy around there would be to restore, you know, the, really, the water system there. I mean, like the whole environmental water system there is what they would be looking at. You know, it's not just put it in the river and it just is in the river for a while, but it's about putting it in the soil and then actually working to actually restart a system that has stopped a long time ago. Yeah. And so, you know, I think it's a great idea, but I just am like, to be honest, whoever pays them the most money is who's going to get it, that's who's going to get it. And so probably data centers, you know, and in that, in that, you know, frame of reference, you have to think, okay, whatever they're putting in there, what's going to come out and on the other side is there needs to be. We need to be knowing what that is, you know, and there's just a lot of.
• 53:27
  Speaker A: But at least we know to consider with the work that you've started on this, at least we got a kind of. Got a baseline of faith. We know what the next set of issues is.
• 53:35
  Speaker C: Exactly.
• 53:35
  Speaker A: And that's so much of research.
• 53:37
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 53:38
  Speaker C: It's an, it's an iterative process.
• 53:40
  Speaker A: It is.
• 53:40
  Speaker B: And I wish that that's something that we can all grasp about science because it's like we throw the baby out with the bathwater because we're like, well, see, they told us to use leeches. And so now we can't trust anything anybod.
• 53:52
  Speaker A: But you also had people saying, I am the science. The science is settled. Science is never.
• 53:56
  Speaker B: No, science is never.
• 53:57
  Speaker A: Science is an open question. And if you're, if you Ever think where there's no. There's no more question to ask? That just means that you're not a very bright person.
• 54:04
  Speaker B: Well, but you also have to go, this is the best we have at the time. And you've got to be able to make some kind of recommendation off of what, you know, whether that is we do nothing because we don't have enough science.
• 54:17
  Speaker C: You know, and if you do nothing, if they, you know, in the Permian specifically, there's a lot of produced water. For right now, for every barrel of oil that you pull out, five and a half barrels of produced water come with it. And what do you do with that if you can't really re. Inject it anymore? Because we're having all of these issues with induced seismicity because the earthquakes and well, blowouts and ground uplift and subsidence, and eventually you'll have a catastrophic enough earthquake to where your oil and gas operations are in trouble. And therefore. Yeah, I mean, I do.
• 54:53
  Speaker B: Right, exactly. Like, do you wait until. That's what, that's what I don't understand too, is like. And I see them saying, we can't wait. We have to do something. Like, I remember two years ago someone saying, but do we have an, you know, something. A cost effective. And I can remember someone saying, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's cost effective anymore. We have to do. We have to do this.
• 55:15
  Speaker C: Kick the can down the road for way too long to.
• 55:19
  Speaker B: I know.
• 55:20
  Speaker C: To throw a fit about price now.
• 55:22
  Speaker A: Well, that's the thing about it too, is nothing is cost effective at first. Right. That's just, that's just the nature of the beast that, you know, the automobile wasn't cost effective until Henry Ford, you know, put them in an assembly line and said he wants to make them cheap enough for his workers to buy them. And that was just. I mean, they were. That's just the way it is. And so any new technology is always. I mean, listen, I remember buying my first computer back well before you were born. And that was, you know, you start looking at that and put it in today's dollars and it would be like, I mean, unbelievable.
• 55:58
  Speaker C: Even televisions. Yeah, televisions used to cost so much, and now people are like buying four at a time from Costco.
• 56:03
  Speaker B: I know. Because they are the only thing that's che.
• 56:06
  Speaker C: Cheap right now.
• 56:07
  Speaker B: And, you know, I'm convinced it's because if they. If we don't have TVs, like, they got to be able to market to us consistently. So we'll keep buying all the other stuff that's expensive.
• 56:16
  Speaker A: My favorite conspiracy TV conspiracy theory is this. The reason that TVs are so cheap is because the smart TVs are selling your data. So they're not making money off the tv, they're making money on your data.
• 56:30
  Speaker B: Well, that. That. That is highly likely, just so you know. It is.
• 56:34
  Speaker A: A hat does not have any tin foil in it. There is nothing.
• 56:38
  Speaker B: I don't know. One time I would have said, that's crazy. But now I'm like, you just. Man, we never know. And. And they're not like, do you know they're not necessarily produced in the United States? So, like, how do we know for sure? We cannot say, hey, hey, China, you cannot import something that has a tracking device on it. Okay? And we don't have track tracking device sniffing dogs to, like, go around us. You know what I mean? A huge container or Cargo Shipload of
• 57:06
  Speaker A: TVs, so going back, moving on, circling back around. So now you've. You've talked about how there's the boron levels in there. That's a cautionary red flag that we've got to pay attention to. So what is the next. Are you done with your research or you still have another. Are you still doing more? Are you in the publishing phase of it at this point?
• 57:28
  Speaker C: I'm in the publishing phase, so I'm really close to finishing up my manuscript I've been working on. I gotta cut, like, 194 more words to meet the word count, and I don't know if I can do it, but, yeah, probably by the end of this month, I'll submit this for publication, and it'll hopefully be accepted, and then y' all can read it.
• 57:47
  Speaker B: Congratulations.
• 57:48
  Speaker C: Thank you.
• 57:48
  Speaker B: That's really cool. Hey, so we're gonna take one. Let's take one break. But we're not gonna actually take a break because we're gonna talk about HSI for a minute.
• 57:54
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 57:55
  Speaker B: So HSI came. HSI is a mobile desalination for.
• 58:01
  Speaker A: It's a mobile.
• 58:03
  Speaker B: It's sulfur burner, but it. Right, he's right.
• 58:06
  Speaker A: It's not decent acid that you can inject into your water to lower the PH of your water.
• 58:10
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's really cool.
• 58:11
  Speaker A: Really cool.
• 58:12
  Speaker B: And it's. It's, like, portable. You put it on a trailer and so you can actually take it and put it from one pivot and use it for a while. No, it's sulfur.
• 58:22
  Speaker C: It's just sulfur. Elemental sulfur.
• 58:23
  Speaker B: Yes. It's not. Well, some kind of special something that they do with the sulfur. And then they. They burn the sulfur pellets and that's injected into the. To the water as it goes into the system. And it doesn't actually get rid of the sodium, but it.
• 58:36
  Speaker A: It just changes your ph, changes the.
• 58:38
  Speaker B: Yeah, so.
• 58:39
  Speaker C: And therefore the availability.
• 58:41
  Speaker B: Right. Yeah. So it's a really cool solution. And they are a sponsor of our show, so really like to talk about them. But also Jake, who's one of the owners, was here a couple weeks ago and. And we met up for like. We had like both had like 10 minutes to have coffee. And then I was like, you need to come back next week when we have the tour, the NASA tour. And so he came and spent like, you know, two and a half days here touring and stuff. And we got to know him better. Man, it's great company, great people. This. This particular piece of equipment has been used like since the 50s in. In California. It's like all over California, but it's the first time it's been used here. And he told me that he was at a meeting here locally and somebody came up to him and said, hey, is so. And so have your equipment out on his place. And he's like, yeah. And he goes, man, I gotta try that. Okay. He's the only one. He's like had four different people come up to him, you know, and so if you're you, I have an issue with some salty water. I think it's actually. Truly is a solution.
• 59:43
  Speaker A: It's certainly worth. I mean, it's. You know, the first time I ever ran across anything like this was a vineyard in the hill country. They would inject sulfuric acid. And you have a big, huge container of sulfuric acid. And I'm not going. I'm like sitting there leaning against this tank. The guy's like, yeah, that's where we prefer sulfuric acid. And I'm like going. Looking at it, it's a thousand gallons. And like, I step away from that for a little bit.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a much safer way to do this.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker A: Was a chemist.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker B: No.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker A: But now he is no more because what he thought was H2O was H2. So 4.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker C: I'm gonna steal that.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker B: That's okay.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker A: I still.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker B: You definitely should. You should definitely steal that.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker A: But that's that joke I learned in college.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker B: Oh my gosh. My kids got my husband a book of dad jokes. Like he needs them, but ages up.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker A: I mean, that's.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker B: It really is great technology. It's been around proven for a long time. And it's here, it's. And it's something I think that folks really should be looking at.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker A: The wildest thing about it is that it's. It basically has no moving parts. And so there's like. It doesn't, like, wear out.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker B: Yeah. And you can. You have it. They build it whatever size you need. You can literally have it on a trailer. And so you can use it for one pivot for a while, then move it to another pivot for a while. I mean, it's a really. It really is a great. The best solution, I think I've seen for that salt water problem's been going on a long time in the southern part especially.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker A: I mean, you know, you can't, like, you're talking about the buffering capacity of our soil. I mean, you. Anything you can do to help start doing that stuff. I mean, you get compaction, you get, you know, sodic soils that are just, you know, welded together. And it makes it hard to. You can't. It's hard to do a reclamation product on something that it's had that much salt on it. And some of our water down the end, you know, in. Terry Gaines Yokum, where it has. Is just ridiculously hard. I mean. I mean, it's. It's bad here in town when you.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker C: Well, and as we, you know, continue to pull from the Ogallala aquifer, that will get worse because it's the same kind of concentration effect. Right.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker B: That's exactly. That's right. And I think that's a lot of what's happening too, in some of the places. It's just, you know, as it's going
• 1:01:53
  Speaker A: away, it's, you know. You know, you get a coffee shop in there, people are talking about, you know, it's almost like the water is not as wet as it used to be. And there's actually some, you know, that's a.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker B: Well, that is. That's so interesting. That's a suggestion, a thought. But it's really kind of true to put it. Yeah.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker A: I mean, it's, you know, it's the three year. You know, what is the third grade version of it, but.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker B: That's Right. But it's. That's a really. A great way to say it. And I think that's why I know that there's a lot of folks this year that have said, I won't have enough irrigation water to supplement my cotton. I saw cotton.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker C: Oh, it looks terrible.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker B: I, like, knock. Teared up driving past this farm because I was like, I've never. I'VE never seen it like the stalk was like this white. It was. Because, you know, a lot of times when it's like dry, it looks like, okay, it's been defoliated or, you know what I mean, the leaves are falling off. Oh, no, no.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker B: This was like. I'd never seen anything like it. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. It is another bad year. It is.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker C: And how many have we had in a row?
• 1:02:54
  Speaker B: I know, I know.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker C: But talking about the salt issue, I didn't see any risk of soil salinization or certification under these treatments.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker C: And like I said, the electric conductivity is lower in all three of the produced water types than it is the groundwater, which is a measure of salt.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker A: Right?
• 1:03:14
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker C: Because our groundwater sucks like it really does. But there's also another side to that. So the polished, desalinated produced water, that super clean stuff, has such a low electric conductivity, such a low sodium absorption ratio, a lack of these cations and that lack of ionic strength in the water can cause soil crusting too. Which I know sounds like kind of counterintuitive, but if you'll allow me to get a little nerdy, do it for a hot second. Sorry for the listeners.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker A: Do it only periodically.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker C: So lack of ionic strength in water can cause the expansion of the diffuse double layer around soil colloids. So you have these little tiny pieces of soil of clays. They have kind of an electric. They're charged.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker B: Right. They have a field, electric field around
• 1:04:08
  Speaker C: them sort of clays are negatively charged. Right. Opposites attract. You're going to attract the positively charged cations. Now you can have things that are plus one, plus two, plus three. Right. So different levels of that positive ionic aspect to it. And that changes the thickness of this layer around the soil colloid. And that kind of impacts how close your clays are together. Are they expanding or are they super tight together? And so the thinner this double layer is, the more and more your clays kind of stick together and you get reduced infiltration. Oh, my goodness. Then you apply the water. You know, you water your watering can, you apply it on the soil. It's not really going to percolate.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker C: And it's just going to sit there and then it's going to evaporate and then the salts are going to stay behind. You're gonna have a crusty soil. And what's interesting is cotton typically, we say, is a salt tolerant crop. Right. But it's also a weak emerger. So when, when cotton comes up, it's kind of like bent, right?
• 1:05:15
  Speaker B: Yes, it is.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker C: And it has to break through the soil surface. But if it's all crusty and hard, how's it gonna do that? Yeah, so yes, it's salt tolerant when it's. When it submerged.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker A: That's why they made chicken pluck.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker A: That's a piece of farm. Probably a piece of farm equipment you don't know about.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker C: No, I don't.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker A: It's a gang rotary hoe. We where we are.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker B: It's even a better word for it
• 1:05:35
  Speaker A: where, where we are that this happens. It crusts over.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker A: Very easily. And so we have a plow that goes through the wheel about this big with little fingers on. They vary. Some of them are about that big and some of them are about that big. But they got fingers. They go through there and that's what they do is they go in and break up that crust. Just barely hit that when it's in the crook. You run that and it goes in and pushes up instead of where you get big shank. And it's just dead.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker C: Right. But that's just something else to consider. Right about, you know. Yes. It's kind of almost that distilled water quality. But it has effects.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. You know, that's the thing about it is without the work that you've done, we wouldn't know that, you know, and now we, you know, the more things that you know, hey, here's a possible downside of this. Here's a flip side.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker C: Then you can mitigate it.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker A: Then you can mitigate, you know, then it's, you know, you run to the, you know, whether the law of unintended consequences. Everything has gotten the more consequences. You know, it narrows down the unintended consequences that you can have.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker A: Down the line. But I mean it's, you know, there's so much exciting about, I mean, and honestly, I'm not a chemistry guy, but it's. There's so much exciting about the chemistry research that you're doing in this thing. And there's so much upside to it that even if, even if, you know, every problem hasn't been solved, you know, so many things have been identified with your research here that I mean, there's, I mean you could probably do based. Just based off the research you've done, there's probably room for 10 more PhD thesis to be run off.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker C: Oh, and they're already. Yeah, I mean, I mean this is only one project in the Texas Produced Water consortium going on at Tech. There are many, many, many other grad students just like Me doing their own stuff, doing, doing field trials too. And that's only because of the funding though.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker C: Because the, the state threw so much money at this, which was needed. That's why we're able to do this. But if you, if you don't have the, the funding for science, then we can't answer these questions and then you don't know and then you're kind of back where you started.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker A: And this is, I mean, you know, there's, it is the, the road. But from where we stand on produced water right now and from, from raw produced water is what I'm going to delineate raw produced water to usable produced water is long and winding and you know, we're taking the first steps on a journey to get to where we can. Can you can utilize.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker C: We are on the way.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker B: My, my. I think the first time that I first meeting that I went to where there was a lot of conversation about produce water was 2021. 2021. And that's. So that's. I've been kind of watching and been a part of those conversations since then. And I'm, I would say that what's happened in the last 18 months is, is probably what has happened. Happened the first three years before. I mean like, and I think really what kind of kicked it into gear too is it feels like to me, so New Mexico made a lot of movement and then they were like, stop, this is a dangerous. We gotta quit this. And that really shifted a lot of, I think people's focus back into Texas. And so a lot of stuff that was happening really kind of, it feels like to me kind of kicked it into gear. And then also Shane coming in and, and the work that he's done, he's really got things moving. Yes, he has gotten things moving and I'm sure glad that he's there because he's, he's a great asset.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker C: Well, I know the industry's throwing money at it too.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker B: Oh yeah.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker C: It's really, I mean the, the absolute hold up on science is, is always money based.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker A: It's always. Yeah.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker C: It's not a lack of drive, it's not a lack of intelligence. It's money.
• 1:09:22
  Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because. I mean there's, because for, you know, if you, for every dollar out there, there's probably a dozen researchers scrambling for it or more, you know, and every
• 1:09:33
  Speaker C: one of them has a good idea that. That and a question that needs to be answered.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker A: It's like, it's, you know, and I'm big About joking about the, you know, my favorite research project was the one where they put shrimp on treadmills. The NIH funded a study to put shrimp on and swear it's an, It's a thing.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker B: But anyway, okay, do we have a paper about it? I'm gonna have to read
• 1:09:58
  Speaker A: that. They killed during. That came out during those, the Doge Fest. But there's always something like that. But for every something like that that makes headlines, that makes people just like, well, we shouldn't find anything. There's 15 or 20 or 200 that are more than that, that have, that are just, you know, that have viable applications for a number of different things down the line that you can have, you can have all sorts of things that can come off of this thing that could generate revenue first. It could become its own industry.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker B: Okay. I mean, so we're gonna, we're gonna do some fact checking here. Yes. There was a device that was made, a miniature treadmill using a rubber inner tube, a skateboard wheel bearing and a small motor placed inside a fish tank. The physical device cost less than $50 and the researcher paid for it. So he was placing healthy and bacteria infected shrimp on this moving belt underwater to monitor how well they walked or swam, measuring their oxygen uptake and aerobic performance. Infected shrimp tried much faster and showed elevated blood lactate levels and struggle to recover compared to healthy ship. Helping scientists understand how pathogens limit a marine animal's ability to survive in changing oceans.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker C: And that matters. If you like to eat shrimp, that matters. And I think it's, it's really easy
• 1:11:25
  Speaker A: to, kind of deductive reasoning gets you from point A to point B on that one.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker C: It's, it's easy to, you know, hear a little tidbit about something and make up your mind about it. But it's harder to keep an open mind and be willing to learn. And I think that is very, very important for science.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, I just, I also, you know, I see like right now they're, they're looking at cutting funding. They're cutting the, the earth science budget, which is 3% small as is 3%. I think that's what they said. Quote me on that. It's a very small percentage of the budget of NASA, so they're going to cut it by over half. Which means that we would go from AG satellites, AG would be impacted from knowing having data every three days to just having data every nine days. You know, and so I mean the kind of impact that we're talking about, if you had, if you had satellite data coming through every three days. You could do predictive, like, when am I going to need to do my sorghum silage? We're not gonna have to. When should I cut silage? When should I pack silage? You know what I mean? Like, there's, like, really great solutions that could happen. But I agree. I mean, I think it's just important to us not to, you know, not support things. And Dusty's right. I mean, there are ridiculous. There are some stupid things out there, but sometimes, too, they're not. There's a reason behind them. And it's just a. A way to get people upset sometimes, to just, you know, cradle a talking point. But at the same time, we don't want to fall behind. And there's a reason we've led the world in all of the technology and all of the, you know, health, medical and all these different things. Like, we need to continue to support a lot of IT research.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker A: I mean, you've got, you know, when you take the starting and intermediate steps of any research are always the most, for lack of a better word, just esoteric. You know, they're just kind of looking at something. It's almost like from the outside, it's like you're looking at something just to look at something, you know, but you're not actually. It's a step. It's a foundational building block. The principles that you learn in one project can be taken to the next product. And so you don't have to reinvent the wheel by looking at this again. You already know this is what happens when we do this. And so the next step up is here. So what I'd like to ask you is if you could wave a magic wand and have all the funding that you wanted, what would be the next piece of research that you would like to do?
• 1:14:05
  Speaker C: Well, the next piece of research I am going to do is looking at changes to phosphorus and sulfur at a spectroscopic level. Here's a vocab word for you. This is involving X rays, and this is using high, high, high high energy at national laboratory facilities to look at the speciation of the phosphorus and sulfur. Now I'll give you a quiz question.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker A: I'm gonna fail this quiz.
• 1:14:34
  Speaker C: What form of sulfur do plants take up?
• 1:14:38
  Speaker A: I do not know.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker C: Sulfate.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker A: I should know that because
• 1:14:44
  Speaker C: they cannot take up just sulfur. They cannot take up reduced sulfur. And so the speciation, that's what that means. What form is the sulfur in impacts, if the plant can see it or not and use it or not, and so I'm gonna take, you know, my soil samples and I have, I went out to the Stanford National Laboratory, I went out to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long island and I use these X ray techniques to look at the speciation of the phosphorus and sulfur to see is the produced water changing the form of it and therefore if the plants can use it.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker B: Oh my goodness. Because like, what a question. Who would have. I would have never thought that ever.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker C: But if I just say it in layman's terms, I'm shooting X rays at dirt. That sounds stupid. That sounds like a waste of money, but it's not.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Yes, that's hilarious. Oh, that's hilarious, but so true. Right?
• 1:15:42
  Speaker A: Somebody's gonna clip that and say that
• 1:15:44
  Speaker B: tech researchers are shooting at my career.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker C: Exactly. That's right.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker B: Look at those crazy people on the radio. They're interviewing people who are taking X rays of dirt.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker C: But if something sounds crazy, if something scientific sounds crazy, don't just walk away from it, look into it.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker A: Because it may be crazy or it
• 1:16:02
  Speaker C: may be important and answer a question that matters.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker B: Most likely it is.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker C: Most likely people spend years and years and years of their lives. I've been in a Texas Tech since 2019 and I learned something new every day.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker B: Wow.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker C: And then I'm going to take this knowledge and I'm going to use it to help people. But you got to give me the chance to learn first.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker A: Well, there's so much stuff that's going to come and I mean there will be in my lifetime and I figure I got 20 odd years left. There will be an industry that grows up around produced water.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker B: Oh yeah.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker A: That makes money. Like an oil well, probably.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker A: Because you know, you talked about, was it five barrels or so of water for every barrel of oil in the Permian? You get outside the Permian, you get in Terry county and that's. I think it's 11.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker C: And it will continue to rise.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker A: And you know, and you wind up with, you know, that's one of the reasons that they're. That the oil wells in a lot of places outside of that are not pumping now is because there's just too much produced water. They make too much water. But if there's a way to utilize it rather than just dumping it down in a saltwater, salt water injection well, then all of a sudden, hey, you know what? I can, you know, I can buy this oil well, run the oil well, take the oil off of it, sell the water too. And now I've got all of a sudden My oil well is, is profitable again, you know, and you've got a whole other industry and then you wind up with, you know, cleaning up. One of the big, you know, one of the big eyesores in the oil industry, in my opinion, is that is the water that it produces.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker B: So I think to your point, while ago, Catherine, I have a family friend that has been finishing up. She's now finished with her PhD, but she was in the. Caught in the middle of all the Doge stuff and they cut her funding. And I know many people like that. Yeah. So she actually invented a new technique for a tool that they've been using in the mining industry for years and it so improved the efficiency of it. Like it is, it is being adopted, you know, and they, you know, kind of had to rob Peter to pay Paul in order for her to finish out her first, like year of, I mean, her last year of this research. And I think that is something the mining industry wouldn't have.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker C: And that is an intelligent American woman.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker C: Who wants to earn a PhD to earn a doctorate. Isn't that what we want? Like, don't we want our population, our domestic citizens to better themselves?
• 1:18:37
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:18:37
  Speaker C: But if you are getting the rug pulled out from under you, I mean, it's devastating.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker B: Right. It's been a hard time. It has been. And I think, I think I will
• 1:18:46
  Speaker A: tell you right now, it's. Sadly, it's probably going to get worse before it gets better because it's. At some point in time we'll decide that we can't print any more money and a lot of money is going to go away.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker B: It's going to be really, like, we just have not. It's interesting to me, like, we just have not got a hold of the national debt at all. And there's a lot of things happening right now and we could be all gloomy, but yet we go forward because
• 1:19:11
  Speaker C: what choice do you have?
• 1:19:12
  Speaker B: That's right. The neck. We do the, the next, the next right thing and the next good thing is what you do. And, and if, you know, I just say people, I think in the United States are very giving, and not necessarily corporations are giving, but people and individuals are very giving. And I think that that's one thing that I've seen is people stepping in to say these needs have to be met and we'll figure out how to meet them, you know, and so, and I think that's a, that's a good quality in us and maybe hopefully that's something that can continue as we quit funding it. Maybe through tax dollars.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker A: I think, you know, there's, it's, it's more narrow. It's a better way for funding, I think, to, to occur, for it to come from people in the private sector. But it's at the same time because it's.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker B: I think it just depends.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker C: It depends.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker B: But.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker A: But it depends. But it's also more narrow and directed when it comes to the private sector because you don't have broad sweeping grants. You have a guy that says, I'll give you a million dollars. But I want you to study that.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker B: Yeah. I want you to prove this.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker A: To be in this.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker C: Yes, but what if what I find isn't what they want to hear?
• 1:20:23
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:20:23
  Speaker C: Because working with the industry, I have. Before I submit this paper for publication, I have to send it to them.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:20:31
  Speaker C: That, to me, I'm okay with that. You know, I needed the money to do that. And I trust that they funded this because they want answers and not because they, they want a talking point. But when you don't have that academic
• 1:20:46
  Speaker A: freedom, you wind up with the pharmaceutical industry. That's what you wind up with. You know, that's a bad one. We're just going to knock. Not to talk about that one, but we'll talk about this one over here. You know, you probably are too young to remember Fin Thin.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker A: The diet drug that was all the rage and then it wound up destroying women's heart valves.
• 1:21:08
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker A: And before that there was another one for morning sickness that caused polytomides.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker C: Yeah, I literally just talked about that in a class.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker A: I mean, it's just, it's, you know, but at any rate. But some of the thing about it is that some research projects can only be done with government funding.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker A: I mean, that's just the way it is.
• 1:21:29
  Speaker B: Most.
• 1:21:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. Especially the early steps of something before everybody realizes what, how viable it can be and you can go into it. You know, there's so much of that. There's so much of stuff that. And it's just, you know, it's.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker B: I think, I think if you, if you narrow it down to one thing, it's just, you know, the more information we have, the more corrupt we see, more corruption we see. And then that just builds and confirms this lack of trust. And so it's a whole, you know, how are we as Americans going to take responsibility that we. And I'm like, oh, they're all, they're all fraudsters. They're all crooks. Well, we as American citizens are electing them. And at what point do we as citizens say, hey, it's. It's important for us to be involved.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker A: Somebody asked me talking to somebody the other day, and I was like, I don't even remember the last time I voted for a guy I really wanted to vote for. I just voted for the least sleaziest person that I thought was on the ballot. I'm like, that's a pretty damning.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker C: You know, and I think when those people. When, when whoever you think is sleazy, whoever you think is corrupt, if they're telling you this scientist is doing this and you don't actually speak to the scientist.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker B: Mm.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker C: Are you being misled?
• 1:22:48
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker C: And what is the purpose of that misleading you?
• 1:22:52
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker C: Because there is always a purpose.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker B: Right. And I think it's important for us to remember. I mean, it's. It's not just one side or the other. You know what I mean? It's a. You know, we're looking at a full spectrum of seeing like it's. It's all the way around, you know, and we really have to be. Take our own God given common sense and, and look at. I love ground news. Do y'. All. Do y' all ever watch? Ground news is like, they show you, like, here's. Here's the headlines on an issue from the right and the left, and then here's some documentation for like, where they're getting their information from so that you get to decide. It's a great.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker A: I don't care which side it's on, but if something comes across, my newsfeed or timely timeline, and it's a very provocative headline. I just always assumed that they're just right full of crap.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker B: See how we got onto politics. And like, really, this is not even about politics, actually. But it does wind up being about it because it's about tax dollars.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker A: It is about funding. It is about.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker C: It is about all the research I told you all about would not have been possible without the funding from the state.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:24:04
  Speaker C: From the government.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker A: And that's. I mean, you know, and the good thing, the interesting thing about it is that the state of Texas has done a really crappy job of making an industry pay for their own research and repairs. You know, when it comes to the. Particularly in. And it's not just in oil and gas, that's a broad spectrum over. Across the entirety of the state, is that the users are the. The people that are making the making bank off of it are not.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker B: Well, because we won't. Don't. We don't want to disincentivize them from coming and then what happens is the people are the ones that carry the burden.
• 1:24:42
  Speaker A: I mean, I've heard that one a lot and that's, you know, from typically from people on my side of the aisle and they're going to drill oil for oil in the Permian Basin. That's just how it's going.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker B: Well, and if you look at, you look at like what happened with when we went through to start raising awareness on the need to update our oil and gas energy like disposal regulations hadn't been updated since the 80s. Oil and gas were like, this is making all of us look bad. Like who? Like people shouldn't be doing this. And the big companies are saying we're not doing this and we don't want people to think we're doing it, so please fix this.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker B: You know, and so when coal companies are coming to the states saying this is a problem, you're making us look bad.
• 1:25:26
  Speaker A: Well, and that's the thing about it too is that the ironic thing about it is that if you were to the more you tighten the restrictions on stuff and make everybody do like, let's say you tighten it to where you know, it's got to be kept pristine and you know, you can't put more oil wells on it than then, you know, like two per section because you can use horizontal drilling now and so we can bring the lesser prairie chicken back and all that kind of thing. You know, do every jump through, you
• 1:25:49
  Speaker B: have to do all the soil remediation and you have got to figure fix every hole.
• 1:25:51
  Speaker A: So all you would do is you would actually make the, the bigger oil producers more profitable because they're the only ones that have the profit margin and the cash flow to do that kind of stuff and drop all the small guys out.
• 1:26:04
  Speaker B: Well, that's what that was the argument. I mean that was the argument about the, you know, like it's going to take longer to get the permits. It's going to take, you know, it's going to cost more money. But at the same time you're like, okay, these things have to be kept in check.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker C: You know what I mean?
• 1:26:18
  Speaker A: And so yeah, we're already paying out the wazoo for gas. We might as well get, get something out of it.
• 1:26:25
  Speaker B: I know, but I just looked up all those things.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker A: I'm excited to see where you go, oh yeah, on this stuff, I cannot wait.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker B: We're good. You want to come back?
• 1:26:35
  Speaker C: Sure, yeah.
• 1:26:37
  Speaker B: You get some more, you get some more, you get some more evidence, you get your paper published.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker B: Come back get it. Get online and go, like scheduled another time to come.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker A: Because then we can ramble on. We can have. Maybe we'll have Andy here and we can really.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker B: Oh, we'll get. So yeah, we're missing one of our hosts. My brother Andy's gone and no one knows where. He left without telling us or getting us.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker A: I know where he is. I just thought it was next week.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker B: Okay, well, I didn't know. I don't know where he is. But anyway. Well, this has been a great. Another great week of discussion and so informative, and I hope that folks are paying attention to the produce water issue and the potentials and the roadblocks and the yield signs that we need to be aware of. And let's see, next week we. Oh, my goodness. Next week.
• 1:27:26
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:27:26
  Speaker B: We have Nathan and I'm sorry, I cannot remember his last name. Oh, my gosh. But he is. Runs the Olafactor dog laboratory Research.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker C: What?
• 1:27:39
  Speaker A: I'm excited about that one.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker C: I've seen those dogs.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker B: I keep hearing that people are like, I've seen those dogs out there. You need to talk to them. I'm like, so I'm super excited to have him on next week. That's gonna be fun.
• 1:27:49
  Speaker A: So we will see you next week back on the dry side.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker B: That's right. Bye.