Latest / Conservation Stories / From Waste to Wealth: Unlocking the Value of Produced Water with Aric Denton

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From Waste to Wealth: Unlocking the Value of Produced Water with Aric Denton · Conservation Stories

• 0:14
  Speaker A: Hello, friends. This is your host, Tillary Timmons Sims. Welcome back to Conservation Stories. This is a podcast that's hosted by the Sandhills Area Research Association. And I am excited today because we actually have someone in studio face to face conversation. I am excited to talk to Aric Denton about all kinds of things about produced water. And we've had some conversations about produced water here on the podcast before. We've spoken to Mike Hightower. He is the head of the Produce Water Consortium in New Mexico. And then we had conversation with Senator Perry, who is all things water and very. He's very excited about bridge produced water and what can happen there. So I know just enough about produced water air to be dangerous. So give us a little bit of your background first and kind of tell us about yourself and your. Your education and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:11
  Speaker B: I grew up in Big spring, Texas, about 100 miles from here. So I grew up farming.
• 1:18
  Speaker A: Grew up on the farm.
• 1:19
  Speaker B: Yeah. Grow cotton about. I think they got up to 5,000 acres at one point. So, yeah, pretty good size by the time I graduated high school.
• 1:26
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:26
  Speaker B: And so I've been around, like, the oil field quite a bit because, you know, there was. Oh, yeah, lots of oil on the land. We farmed for other people and I think my parents had a little bit. And just in that world a lot.
• 1:37
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 1:38
  Speaker B: I remember when I was little, we lived on the farm and there were some tank batteries there and the pumper would come by every day and I'd go get in the truck with him and ride around.
• 1:48
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, we have. We lived out towards Gaines county, so I don't know if that sounds. If that's familiar to you, but like out there, kind of on the boundary line of Terry County, Gaines county, and we had all kinds of bull traffic because we had one of the only paved roads because the county commissioner lived out there. It was nice. So, yeah, so we had a paved road. And so, yeah, they flew up and down those. That road all day long.
• 2:17
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah. It never ends.
• 2:18
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:18
  Speaker B: You know, when the oilfield really started picking up in, oh, like 2006, 2008, somewhere in there, suddenly our really, you know, silent, quiet corner of the world, people driving by and three in the morning, four in the morning wake you up.
• 2:33
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Speaker B: You know, just like when they put up all the wind turbines that were blinking would keep us awake.
• 2:37
  Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
• 2:37
  Speaker B: Because we were just so used to being dead and quiet out there. But on those wells there at the house, there was an injection well there for the produce water from those two Pumps there.
• 2:48
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 2:49
  Speaker B: And over the years those wells were drilled in the 80s.
• 2:52
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 2:52
  Speaker B: So they weren't making much, but by the time I got old enough to kind of know anything about it, that injection well had sort of permeated into that formation and it basically those wells were just making the water again. It had pushed more water. I mean, I think initially the idea was to water flood and pushed some of the oil that way.
• 3:13
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 3:14
  Speaker B: This is long before fracking.
• 3:16
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 3:16
  Speaker B: For some of the modern methods, but they were just producing water. You know, they might make a barrel a day on a 10,000 foot well and then, you know, 40, 50 barrels of water a day.
• 3:27
  Speaker A: Right.
• 3:28
  Speaker B: And they're kind of going in a circle. Finally they started hauling it off.
• 3:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:32
  Speaker B: I remember when I was little that injection will start leaking on the surface.
• 3:36
  Speaker A: Oh, yes.
• 3:36
  Speaker B: And they spent, I don't know how much time cleaning it up.
• 3:40
  Speaker A: I thought, well, that was good. At least they did.
• 3:42
  Speaker B: They cleaned it up. Well, we made them clean it up. It was in our cotton field.
• 3:44
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 3:46
  Speaker B: And like half a mile from our house.
• 3:47
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 3:48
  Speaker B: That's not stuff you want around.
• 3:49
  Speaker A: No, it is not.
• 3:51
  Speaker B: That's some really nasty water.
• 3:53
  Speaker A: Yes. We, we just finished a campaign on encouraging people to just at least take notice about what our regulations are in the state of Texas for energy waste, which is very little. Very little. So some of that could use some updating.
• 4:10
  Speaker B: I agree and I think the railroad commission kind of agrees. So I've been, I've talked with them a little bit and they are getting ready to start. Maybe they've already started restricting some of the zones that people can inject into.
• 4:22
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: Which is going to cause a major issue, I think, in the long run with finding somewhere to protect, you know, so a lot of people like to blame the, the issues we're having in West Texas on the fracking and I'm sure that can have some issues, but this, the volume of water they're fracking with is not, don't get me wrong, it's a ton of water. But it's not enough to be causing these issues.
• 4:45
  Speaker A: Right.
• 4:45
  Speaker B: Because when they, when they frack a vertical well, they may go through a quarter million barrels of water or more.
• 4:52
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 4:53
  Speaker B: On one well. But that's not in the grand scheme of things. And you know, geologically not very much water.
• 4:59
  Speaker A: Right.
• 5:00
  Speaker B: But if you've got, you know, 500 wells all producing water all day long every day.
• 5:05
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 5:05
  Speaker B: And then you pump all that water to an injection site, maybe not 501, but yes, you know, you have tons of them.
• 5:11
  Speaker A: Right.
• 5:11
  Speaker B: And this single inject, the single well where they're injecting is pumping in 10 to 50,000 barrels of water a day for years. That starts to add up to a lot of mass shift.
• 5:24
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 5:25
  Speaker B: And the pressure, too, of course, is.
• 5:27
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 5:27
  Speaker B: You know, permeating, but it's just a lot of mass. You're physically moving around.
• 5:30
  Speaker A: Yes, I know. I see it all the time. Every time there's like some, you know, small earthquake or anything like that, it's like fracking. And I'm like, well, actually, I mean, it is. It's a. It's a side effect, I guess you could say, a consequence of having the water that is coming out of fracking. But do you think. What is your. What is your thoughts on. Because, you know, we're bringing in a lot of stuff from New Mexico. So in New Mexico. And they will be deciding to keep their water and not bring it in anymore because they're building a market for produced water. Yeah. So is that going to cut. Automatically cut us down a lot?
• 6:08
  Speaker B: I can't imagine it make a huge difference. So that if you look at a map of the Permian Basin, about a little less than a quarter of it is in New Mexico, but we still have a lot of it in West Texas.
• 6:17
  Speaker A: Right.
• 6:18
  Speaker B: You know, it goes all the way down, you know, to Pecos and towards El Paso. Really down in San Angelo, even that direction is where that. That major permit basin field.
• 6:28
  Speaker A: There's so much there, though, by Hobbs and my goodness, a lot. Yeah. So. Well, so let. Just for our listener's sake, we talked about you being on the farm. Give us a little bit about your background. You are here at Texas Tech and you're studying to be a doctor.
• 6:47
  Speaker B: Yes. So I have been at Tex Tech far longer than I'd like to admit.
• 6:51
  Speaker A: That's what happens when you're going to be our doctor.
• 6:54
  Speaker B: So I started in undergrad in chemical engineering. I've done my master's and now about to finish my PhD.
• 7:01
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 7:02
  Speaker B: God willing.
• 7:03
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 7:03
  Speaker B: In chemical engineering.
• 7:05
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 7:06
  Speaker B: So my actual research for. For my PhD was partially in polymer material science, but also in energetic materials research. So we did high explosives research for the Department of Defense.
• 7:18
  Speaker A: Oh, okay.
• 7:20
  Speaker B: Doesn't really quite translate to dealing with produced water very well.
• 7:23
  Speaker A: Well, it kind of does. I mean, like, there's stuff in produced water that.
• 7:27
  Speaker B: Yeah, so we were. A lot of our work is studying, like, crystallization and how crystals form and how you can manipulate them to make them, you know, different phases of the same crystal. Or different polymorphs or into different. Trying to make them amorphous. So kind of like window glass or plastic, be able to make it at room temperature, be amorphous. Some of that I think I've been able to translate into one of our possible routes we want to go. And I'll get into that in a little while.
• 7:56
  Speaker A: Okay, interesting. So what we discussed just a little bit on the podcast with Mike Hightower, people probably have heard that by now is there's not just salt in this water. There's a lot of things in there, and there's not always the same things. It's different according to where they've drilled. So not only do you have the issue of cleaning it, then you have an issue of what's coming out of it, which I. You know, when you're thinking in circular economies, you don't ever think of something as waste. You think of something as another market.
• 8:33
  Speaker B: Exactly. So I've been wondering for. For years and years. I mean, me and my grandpa talked about this when I was in, like, junior high, high school. He was a chemist at the refinery in Big Spring.
• 8:44
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 8:44
  Speaker B: So I kind of been around that world.
• 8:46
  Speaker A: Yes. Okay. Yeah.
• 8:47
  Speaker B: Kind of an inspiration to go into chemical engineering.
• 8:49
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 8:51
  Speaker B: When they desalinate water, they'll desalinate seawater. In California, you know, Israel, almost all of its water is desalinated water, I think, from the Red Sea. What do you do with alt salt?
• 9:00
  Speaker A: Right.
• 9:01
  Speaker B: Do you just make a big mountain in Utah somewhere? You know, what do you do with it?
• 9:05
  Speaker A: Right.
• 9:05
  Speaker B: And I got to thinking about that a couple years ago when I was partly during the pandemic. I didn't have anything to do. You know, campus was closed. We couldn't do research. Can't take explosives home with me to work on. So I had a lot of time to ruminate on things.
• 9:19
  Speaker A: Right, right. Oh, my goodness.
• 9:20
  Speaker B: And so I got to thinking about it as we're seeing more like a stronger push into EVs and into batteries, you know, power storage for grid storage. I was kind of thinking, well, you know, we have all this produced water. I wonder if there's any lithium in it. Was kind of the extent. Initially I thought, is there lithium in it?
• 9:43
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 9:44
  Speaker B: And so I went and got a couple samples and had them tested. And it's not the richest.
• 9:49
  Speaker A: Right. Right.
• 9:49
  Speaker B: Because that's really lithium brine.
• 9:51
  Speaker A: East Texas. Right. Is where there's more lithium, I think, in years.
• 9:54
  Speaker B: There's some there. They're really. They found a lot of it in Arkansas and in Nevada Okay. Nevada, there's a ton of. It's not in the produced water. It's in different regions and like geothermal areas after.
• 10:07
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 10:08
  Speaker B: In Arkansas, I think ExxonMobil is working on developing a lithium lithium economy there. Pull it out.
• 10:19
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 10:19
  Speaker B: Because it's kind of low hanging fruit.
• 10:21
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 10:21
  Speaker B: Right. It's got. They have concentrations close to, you know, a thousand parts per million or 3,000 a lot. It's mostly. That would, that would end up being. Not mostly lithium, but.
• 10:32
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:32
  Speaker B: A really high percentage.
• 10:34
  Speaker A: High percentage of it.
• 10:35
  Speaker B: Of the salt. So I tested some here and we're seeing, you know, it varies from. Some of it has none lithium wise. Some of it has. Highest I've seen is 40 or 50 parts per million.
• 10:46
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 10:47
  Speaker B: Which at the prices a couple years ago for lithium, if you did the math on it, there was about. That was when it was at $78,000 a ton for lithium carbonate. Some of the best water I tested, it was about $2.73 worth of lithium per barrel.
• 11:03
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 11:04
  Speaker B: Now that's not how much it would cost to get it out. I mean there's. It depends on the method.
• 11:07
  Speaker A: But yeah.
• 11:08
  Speaker B: Considering you're talking about 10,000 barrels a day on a medium to small size disposal well, it's a pretty big extra revenue stream when they're already having to. Oil companies are already having to pay the disposal. Well. To pump that water down. Right.
• 11:25
  Speaker A: They have to get rid of it anyway.
• 11:27
  Speaker B: Yeah. And they're having to pay you to dispose of it. I don't know what the going rate is now. In the past it's been, you know, from 10 to 50 cents a barrel. So this potentially be worth more than just the right disposal fee.
• 11:39
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 11:40
  Speaker B: Just the lithium in this kind of low hanging or something. Low hanging fruit is the harder to get to.
• 11:45
  Speaker A: Hard to get to. For us.
• 11:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, for us, for here, for here. And here's where we have a big issue with it.
• 11:50
  Speaker A: Right.
• 11:51
  Speaker B: I started thinking about, well, what else is in there? And I haven't done a complete comprehensive test because there's too many things I don't. I'm working on getting a, an instrument to do that with. But there's basically everything in there.
• 12:03
  Speaker A: Mm.
• 12:04
  Speaker B: Everything. Everything.
• 12:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. And New Mexico state has identified all of that pretty much. I mean it's all listed out there and it's, it's a lot, but it's not all in everything. And in every barrel, every barrel is. I mean every, every bit is different because if it's coming out of, you know, they're, they're injecting and putting this water in one space, but it's coming from wells that are in different geographical locations. And so that means it kind of.
• 12:34
  Speaker B: They'Re from different depths, mixes it up. There are different distances from the mountains in New Mexico. A lot of that water, a lot of it was from the Permian Sea that was here, you know, prehistoric times. But a lot of that water has filtered like basically from the mountains of New Mexico across the Permian Basin and underground. I mean, that took many thousands of years to do that. And it doesn't really replenish that I know of. I'm not a geologist, I'm not super well versed on that side. But a lot of that. So it's picked up a lot of stuff along the way. And that depth, the depth that it's at has a lot of effect on.
• 13:08
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 13:08
  Speaker B: When it's going to pick up. Right. One of the big things that I a little concerned about. So there's a company, I can't remember the name of them. They're in around, I think around the Pecos area or they're disposing in the Pecos River. They got a. The EPA gave them a temporary license to clean this water up and dump, I think maybe 600,000 gallons means not much in the grand scheme of things that they're allowing them to as like a pilot program to see if this is a, you know, a marketable way to do this.
• 13:38
  Speaker A: Right.
• 13:39
  Speaker B: And one of the things I kind of worry about is some of the things like radium, for example, is radioactive element. There's not an EPA guideline for things like that for water quality because that doesn't normally exist in water. You don't normally see radium. I mean, there's refined radium depending on the isotope, there's, you know, maybe a few pounds of it refined on the planet because there's no use for it. You know, they used to the radium girls, you know, paint, watch dials with it. But really since then, there's not a lot of use for radium. And that is in quite a bit of water. Yeah, there's uranium in the water, there's a lot of radiation, radioactive material that some of it could have a good direction to go. But I'm not sure that it's going to be the best route to go because maybe this company cleans that stuff up. But the next one coming along may not be as trustworthy.
• 14:33
  Speaker A: Right. I know a lot of the meetings that we've been to, you know, there is, of course, they Want to identify everything that they can that's in there so that they know what people have to start looking for so they can start setting the standards that say, okay, these are all the things that you're going to have to look for. And so once you've got them identified, you know that, to me, that's the hardest part, you know, and then after that, it's like, now companies know what they have to be testing for.
• 14:58
  Speaker B: Right. So what we're trying to do as a bit of market research and just research on what we're going to be dealing with in our project is we're trying to get samples from disposal wells, ideally from the well sites themselves, from pumpers from all around the Permian basin.
• 15:15
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 15:15
  Speaker B: And test that water for everything in there and try to get a good constellation of data to see what regions and depths have what, you know, what elements.
• 15:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. What. What is what you can anticipate and.
• 15:27
  Speaker B: Find where the richer sort of veins are different elements.
• 15:31
  Speaker A: That's actually a great idea because you could. You have somebody almost like you, we have for our soil. So you can go, GIs, this is where I live. And we already know what the soil is there. And you can, you know, see that. Yeah, that's a. That's actually a great idea.
• 15:47
  Speaker B: So we're working on that. We're getting funding to buy an instrument called an ICP Ms. So it's an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. Say that ten times fast.
• 15:58
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 15:59
  Speaker B: Essentially, you could put a few drops of the water in there and it ionizes it, push it down a tube, and it will tell you all of the elements that are in there and the concentration. So it's nice, easy test. They're not cheap instruments, of course, to do something like that, but that is one of the big things we want to do for testing that. Now, that won't tell us if there's phosphates or nitrates or certain, you know, the. We call polyatomic ions things that you may want to use for fertilizers or may want to use for. It won't necessarily tell us that. There's other tests we can do for that.
• 16:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because that's one of the things that Lacy, my colleague and I, feel like that it's like, wait a second, there's some stuff in there that, like, if you're going to use it for agriculture, you might want to leave it in.
• 16:41
  Speaker B: There or extract it and sell it for agriculture. Yes.
• 16:44
  Speaker A: Right.
• 16:45
  Speaker B: So the basic premise of what we're trying to do is have A philosophy of trying to use all the parts of the buffalo. I want to.
• 16:51
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 16:52
  Speaker B: I want to go and selectively pull out each of the different elements out of the water and find a feedstock that we can make that into for other industries, whether that be there's tons of potassium in the water, so you can make potash fertilizers. So potash fertilizer prices have gone up four or six times, I think, since the. Between the pandemic and the invasion. Russia and Ukraine.
• 17:17
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 17:18
  Speaker B: It's a large percentage of potash fertilizer comes from Russia.
• 17:21
  Speaker A: Yes. It'd be nice to not have to be connected to them at all anymore.
• 17:24
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 17:25
  Speaker A: Dependent.
• 17:26
  Speaker B: And, you know, we've got a lot of our precursor chemicals for the chemical plants we do have here in the US Especially on the Gulf Coast. A lot of those come from places like China, Russia.
• 17:36
  Speaker A: Right.
• 17:37
  Speaker B: Not Indonesia, place like that, that are cheaper to produce them. But we saw during the pandemic how quickly our global trade system can break down. You know, whether it be from a pandemic or a war or a natural disaster.
• 17:50
  Speaker A: Right.
• 17:50
  Speaker B: Or just poor relations, whatever it is. I think we need to have capability here to do that stuff.
• 17:55
  Speaker A: Well, absolutely. And we, like. I love what you said. It's like using that whole. The whole buffalo, which is what that means. Circular economies means there's no waste because we're making certain. And I think that was a quality that like our. My grandparents would be your great grandparents. And before I will tell you that we have an old trunk that was on my dad's side of the family. Very, very old. And when the family, I don't know, it had been lost and someone found it or what, but they were all going through it. And there was an envelope. And on the outside, the envelope, it said pieces of string too short to be used. And that is, in fact, what was inside the envelope that has gone away, like. And I'm as guilty as anybody, you know, that I have too much stuff in my house and I buy too much stuff and everything is replaceable.
• 18:47
  Speaker B: But especially people that didn't grow up in Great Depression.
• 18:50
  Speaker A: Exactly. Yes. I mean, it just feels like everything we have and everything we buy is disposable. And so we don't think about, you know, how to. I'm trying to think about in those terms, you know, And I think it's, you know, we. We say here, people, planet, profits, that they are all. They can all be together, they can all coexist, you know, and so that's really what, you know, we want people to understand is that what was once waste, you know, we're in such a time of extreme innovation and development. That doesn't have to be waste anymore.
• 19:23
  Speaker B: And things are growing so fast. I mean, the Permian Basin Oilfield has grown, my goodness, immensely fast, especially with the increased use. Obviously, fracking, like we talked about, has increased the amount of water and oil produced, not because of the fracking, but because it produces more per area.
• 19:39
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 19:39
  Speaker B: Right. So we have more to deal with, but oil's not going away anytime soon.
• 19:43
  Speaker A: A good portion of the oil and gas industry is very well aware of environmental impacts that they have. And there's always bad players everywhere that, you know, we can't just turn off fossil fuels without. Without doing some great harm to people.
• 20:00
  Speaker B: Well, you know, even aside from just the fuel aspect, most of our plastics, most of our.
• 20:08
  Speaker A: We might should turn that part off, though.
• 20:09
  Speaker B: Fertilizers are drugs. Medication.
• 20:13
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 20:14
  Speaker B: A lot of the medical devices.
• 20:16
  Speaker A: Things a lot of people don't understand. I saw such an interesting commercial that was playing in the Houston area, and it literally was like a couple going into an emergency room. And it was all the things that wouldn't be there without. Without the fossil fuel industry. And it was like, empty.
• 20:35
  Speaker B: The paint on the wall.
• 20:36
  Speaker A: Yes, Everything. It was completely empty. Completely empty. Yeah. So, but, you know, to your point, I mean, we're. We're really fortunate because we're right here.
• 20:45
  Speaker B: You know, and it's a problem for us.
• 20:47
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 20:47
  Speaker B: And why not let us find the solution to it?
• 20:50
  Speaker A: Yes, yes. And like Senator Perry saying, like, hey, actually, this is. I think this is a way that actually we can create more markets and, you know, bring in more business and revenue to our area. And I think. I think so, too. And I think if we can figure these things out, it's opportunities for some of these little small communities that kind of boom and bust along with, you know, the way the oil and gas used it used to do. I don't know that we'll see it like that anymore. You know, it seems like it's a steadier pace than it's been in the past.
• 21:23
  Speaker B: It seems to be because we're more independent of it. And I think we're not allowed to sell oil, like, export it, at least minimally export it. So even if oil prices go through the roof outside the US we still have enough to produce our own. I'm not sure that prices here will necessarily track those as strongly as they.
• 21:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. Think about that. I know our LNG goes overseas. I know that 90% of Poland's LNG comes from Texas, so. Yeah, and I think we'll see better use of that. We have, we have so much, we.
• 21:57
  Speaker B: Can'T even refine it all.
• 21:59
  Speaker A: We need to be using it.
• 22:00
  Speaker B: Yeah. Instead of just flaring it.
• 22:02
  Speaker A: I know sometimes it's not good to.
• 22:03
  Speaker B: Flare it now, sometimes driving to Big Springs. But over the last several years, it looked like you were on, you know, on Star Wars Coruscant, the giant city planet, you know, the bottom, just fire everywhere. That's what it looked like driving to Big Springs. Just flames shooting up so far you can't hardly see the road from the glare. They're on 87. There were so many on the north side of Big.
• 22:21
  Speaker A: That was, that must have been a while ago. No, no, no.
• 22:24
  Speaker B: That was in the last three, four years. There's still some there. It's not as bad now.
• 22:30
  Speaker A: No, because I think they're really cracking down on like flaring. Yeah, they don't like to do it. They don't like for people to do it because of the admissions.
• 22:38
  Speaker B: Well, the emissions. But also even that area, if you look around it, there's just black soot everywhere because it's not refined methane or natural gas. It's got everything in it.
• 22:48
  Speaker A: No, I didn't, I don't know anything about this. So. Yes.
• 22:50
  Speaker B: So the reason, the reason they're flaring is because they can't get it into the lines to go to the gas plants. Gas plants don't have enough refining capacity.
• 22:59
  Speaker A: Right. There's not.
• 23:00
  Speaker B: Because those, those poly pipe gas lines, they can't handle a lot of pressure. And they're not compressing it to be a liquid. It's not, it's not under a lot of pressure. It's under maybe, I don't know, I don't know for sure, but maybe 60, 100 pounds of pressure. And that's not very much for, you know, an 8 or 10 inch pipe. Like you can't, you can only fit so much in there. And if you've got, you know.
• 23:23
  Speaker A: Well, and also like, if it's not worth anything, if it's like worth a.
• 23:26
  Speaker B: Negative, whatever, why, why bother?
• 23:28
  Speaker A: Why would you bother? You don't want to spend any money on it, you know.
• 23:31
  Speaker B: You know, I haven't heard anything else about it, but during the pandemic, I heard about a team from A and M, some students day, and it really wasn't based. Yeah, they were setting up. They were taking sea containers and putting a motor in there with A generator that could run off the gas directly. So they were able to clean it up a little bit. And they were setting up bitcoin miners.
• 23:52
  Speaker A: Oh my goodness.
• 23:53
  Speaker B: To use that flared gas. That gas was going to be flared anyways, turning it into bitcoin miners. And that seems like such a duh kind of thing to go do. Like why didn't I think of that?
• 24:03
  Speaker A: Right.
• 24:04
  Speaker B: Especially sitting around doing nothing. That would have been an obvious thing. That was when bitcoin was really starting to climb.
• 24:10
  Speaker A: Oh wow, that's fascinating. Well, we've talked about data centers and how much energy they are going to require.
• 24:19
  Speaker B: I'm not so worried about the energy as the water.
• 24:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. Well, when you have require energy, you require water.
• 24:24
  Speaker B: So we don't have our process figured out completely. We're. There's a lot of, a lot of stuff. Basically we have to be able to refine everything.
• 24:30
  Speaker A: Okay, so step back just a minute. Who is we?
• 24:33
  Speaker B: Okay, so we're DJR Lambs. So I'm one of the co founders and my friends, we're still very early days.
• 24:39
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 24:40
  Speaker B: But called DJR Labs. Denton Jones Research Lab. So my friend's name's Nick Jones.
• 24:45
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 24:46
  Speaker B: We're working on trying to build this company to be able to take the water, use all the parts of it to produce whatever needs to be produced. That list would take more than this.
• 24:57
  Speaker A: Hour we have here. Exactly.
• 24:59
  Speaker B: And then out the back of that, since we're going after what's in the water, we don't want to leave anything behind. So through the courses process, we should have relatively clean water. Water that's economical enough to clean up to use. Whether that be for industrial cooling like data centers or agriculture, which agriculture is not consistent. You know, you don't water in the winter usually.
• 25:22
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 25:23
  Speaker B: Right. So but you could still sell to that and it'd be harder but ideally be able to sell to obviously industry, but to municipalities.
• 25:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. Also in ag, we, we generally, you know, we just, we pay our electricity. So you know, I, I know I've had people ask me how much would. Would farmers pay for it. I was like we pay for everything else. Like no more than what we're paying for electricity probably. You know, so you just couldn't. I don't think that there's a way to add on another cost when you're already losing money.
• 25:57
  Speaker B: Now if you were to sell it to farmers, you'd have to sell it cheap. Right. It had to be really cheap. But so you. But the water quality maybe doesn't have to be as good as what you need for municipalities or what you need for a data center. Data center. If you're doing, I mean, cooling towers, you need really clean water because you'll get scale buildup. Cooling towers work by evaporating all that water. Like an old evaporative air conditioner. Yes, they evaporate all that water and you, all the salts that are in there have to go somewhere, but they're not going to evaporate. They just build up on the surfaces in there and on the pumps and inside the pipes and you get fouling and cause a lot of. And fouling on the heat exchangers. So really you need. Ideally you want really clean water. Now that doesn't always happen. They kind of go with what they got. But if you can have pretty clean water there to reduce their maintenance costs.
• 26:45
  Speaker A: Well, if they come in into this area, you know, this is like the. We got a little of these. A whole lot of these are like a town without the toothache because we have so much minerals in our water. I'm like, if you're here, you're gonna have to clean it up anyway. Yeah, yeah.
• 26:58
  Speaker B: And I would rather them not be taking from the groundwater because we don't have a lot of it.
• 27:03
  Speaker A: We don't.
• 27:03
  Speaker B: Lubbock has a lot more because they're on the Ogalala down in Big Spring and a lot of the Permian Basin. There's not a nice full aquifer.
• 27:10
  Speaker A: Well, there's not a nice full aquifer for here.
• 27:12
  Speaker B: Well, it's not as full anymore.
• 27:14
  Speaker A: We have debatably, we have a. What I call. I call Robert Mesa, our Texas water guru. He says we have about 30 years of irrigation left. So we just don't have a lot of water.
• 27:24
  Speaker B: I saw a documentary was years ago that the Ogalala, you know, it goes.
• 27:28
  Speaker A: Up all the way to the Dakotas.
• 27:30
  Speaker B: Yeah. The Kansas and all of. And they're taking something like 14 trillion barrels of water a year out of it for irrigation.
• 27:37
  Speaker A: Well, a lot of those states are not like us. Right. They're not a right of capture state. So they've put in some limitations and some economic incentives to help people, you know. So we'll see what happens here.
• 27:49
  Speaker B: You know, I'm afraid we're going to have to go to that at some point. The oil field, especially in Big Spring, the oil field is using up the surface water as fast as they can. They finally started cleaning up some of the produced water to use, but they generally will blend it with the surface water. I say service Water, groundwater that's being pumped out.
• 28:09
  Speaker A: And I think it wasn't long ago that I heard that like Big spring has like 10 years of municipal water left or something.
• 28:16
  Speaker B: So do you know, I'm not sure. Now they built a water reclamation facility there. So I think in 2014 or somewhere around there.
• 28:22
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 28:23
  Speaker B: So they're able to take all the sewage and clean that water up to. Actually better than what went into the water system.
• 28:28
  Speaker A: Yes, yes. Yeah.
• 28:30
  Speaker B: And I'm not sure if they're now reusing it. At one point they were doing that and flushing it down to the next into the greater water system, the Colorado. The crmw, Colorado River Municipal Water District.
• 28:41
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 28:42
  Speaker B: Now they may be funneling it back into the water in the city and just keeping that in a circle. And then they can use all the waste for fertilizers and whatever they're. Whatever they're going for.
• 28:52
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:53
  Speaker B: So that extended the water significantly. And I think others, the people there were really grossed out by it at first, but yeah. It increased their water quality.
• 29:03
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 29:05
  Speaker B: Significant.
• 29:05
  Speaker A: I do know. I know. I hear people, you know, they don't. They're gonna, you know, eat organic food that has the same thing on it from a different mammal.
• 29:17
  Speaker B: I've got a friend, they. They farm, they grow hay in. Around Eagle Mountain Lake in DFW area near Fort Worth.
• 29:27
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 29:27
  Speaker B: And they actually fertilize their hay with a. A cleaned up or a. They basically pasteurize human waste.
• 29:36
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 29:36
  Speaker B: It's been liquefied and sprayed on the crop. I don't think the neighbors are real happy about it because it doesn't smell very nice, but.
• 29:42
  Speaker A: Well, neither does. Neither does it. If it comes from like the cow feed lot, it doesn't smell very good.
• 29:47
  Speaker B: I think it smells worse when it's from people.
• 29:49
  Speaker A: Ooh, let's don't talk about that.
• 29:51
  Speaker B: Gross.
• 29:53
  Speaker A: So. But I think we're going to see more and more of that, you know.
• 29:57
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 29:57
  Speaker A: And I know that like there are in. In Austin, like new buildings that are being built, have to have water catchments on them and even like evaporative anything. They have to catch all of it. And now they're just like. A lot of them are completely like self sufficient. They're just cycling that water, cleaning it, cycling it all back through. Of course it does rain there more than it does here. Yeah. But enough of them have been doing that that they've had to. They've quit pulling from one of the. One of the rivers there. I think Robert and I visited about that when he was on. So, yeah, know that they're. They're showing, you know, that some of that, even if it's just means I have enough water to water my yard.
• 30:34
  Speaker B: You know, and I have the water restrictions badly.
• 30:37
  Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Out here on the Texas Plains, water is everything. And there's a resource that's as vital as it is fragile. Our Playa lakes. These lakes are nature's reservoir, catching rainwater to recharge our aquifer and provide lifelines for wildlife. But now they need our help. In collaboration with the Texas Fly Lakes Conservation Initiative and the Cargill Global Water Challenge, SARAH has started the Our Legacy is Tomorrow's Water initiative to inspire and work with landowners to restore and protect our Playa lakes. Each playa we save helps secure a sustainable water future for the generations that will be coming after us. Whether it's improving soil health, restoring habitats, or recharging groundwater, we are committed to making a difference. Together, we can build a legacy that we can all be proud of. To learn how you can join in, visit the Playa Lakes Restoration Initiative page on the SARAH website. Let's keep Texas water flowing strong for the future. Visit sara-conservation.com.
• 32:02
  Speaker B: So it's one of the things we're hoping with the produced water that, you know, West Texas kind of is limited on population growth by the water resources we have because we're already really using too much.
• 32:13
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.
• 32:15
  Speaker B: And unless we can find a way to make it rain more.
• 32:17
  Speaker A: Right, right, right.
• 32:18
  Speaker B: Which is a whole other issue.
• 32:19
  Speaker A: Yes, yes. So can you give us any ideas of, like, what are these end products that some of these things could go into?
• 32:28
  Speaker B: So obviously things like potassium can be made into potash fertilizers, calcium can go into. We think. Haven't tried it yet. And extensively think might have found a way to produce something. One of the. One of the components of Portland cement.
• 32:46
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 32:47
  Speaker B: Directly out of the water without going through a clinker reaction. So the clinker, when you produce cement, will he. They'll take the inputs, they will heat them to, I think like 1800 degrees Celsius for a day and get them to react and it's okay. It removes CO2 from the compound to create the compound that will then react with water and harden. So a lot of people complain that it, you know, cement has a lot of. Whether you. Whatever your feelings are on greenhouse gas emissions, it produces a lot, not just from the energy input, but it directly emits CO2 while you're making.
• 33:22
  Speaker A: Right. While you're making it.
• 33:23
  Speaker B: And then they go and Crush it. But this is a way, I think I've been able to actually apply our work in crystals with the high explosives.
• 33:31
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 33:32
  Speaker B: So there's different polymorphs of the. One of the crystals that it forms.
• 33:39
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 33:40
  Speaker B: Okay. From the. The compound that it makes.
• 33:42
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 33:43
  Speaker B: Compound's got a long name.
• 33:44
  Speaker A: I'm just pretending I know what you're talking about.
• 33:45
  Speaker B: So it's. It's like a calcium silicate.
• 33:48
  Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay.
• 33:48
  Speaker B: Okay. Calcium and basically window glass.
• 33:51
  Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay.
• 33:53
  Speaker B: Sort of.
• 33:54
  Speaker A: Okay. Well, that's enlightenment terms. That's close enough for me.
• 33:57
  Speaker B: Close enough, yes. So normally you don't want it to get wet. Right. Because it will set up.
• 34:02
  Speaker A: Right.
• 34:03
  Speaker B: Well, there are different forms of the crystal that have different solubilities in the water. So some of them will take water up and some won't.
• 34:13
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 34:14
  Speaker B: If we can, through the process, the chemical process, get it to crash out the right crystal directly from the water, then it. And if we have low enough water content, can get it out of the water fast enough, it won't have time to start reacting. And then we can go and put it into something like a ball mill and crush it and turn it into the right polymorph. That will then be one of the main components of Portland cement.
• 34:40
  Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. Now that would be amazing. You're going to be working on that in the next few years, you think?
• 34:46
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 34:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 34:46
  Speaker B: So that's, you know, not. That's one of many things. So there are this. It's going to be one of the more complicated processes because we have to. Not that specifically, but everything.
• 34:58
  Speaker A: Everything is.
• 34:59
  Speaker B: We had to figure out what to do with the lithium and the potassium, the magnesium and the sodium and the chlorine. The sodium and chlorine are the hardest to get rid of because they're the highest concentration. Sodium, you can make a good amount of stuff from it. And chlorine, you can make good amount of stuff from it. So there's a lot of chlorine chemistry that can be done, but chlorine is pretty dangerous.
• 35:16
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 35:17
  Speaker B: So, you know, the. The train derailment up in Ohio, was that last year or this year?
• 35:22
  Speaker A: It was. I think it was last year.
• 35:24
  Speaker B: So they spilled vinyl chloride, which is the monomer precursor for pvc. So what they do, you take vinyl chloride and you polymerize it into polyvinyl chloride.
• 35:35
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 35:36
  Speaker B: And it's pretty safe to use. Right. Use it for water, for everything. But when it's in that state, it's very volatile. Evaporate really easy get into water Soluble a little bit. It's really nasty stuff. So I think that probably the Department of Transportation is going to start limiting or maybe eliminating transport of that material, at least the way they're doing it, because it's too dangerous.
• 35:59
  Speaker A: Right.
• 36:00
  Speaker B: I mean, one tanker going is enough to pollute a whole area for.
• 36:04
  Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. Wow.
• 36:07
  Speaker B: So if we want to go that route of vinyl chloride, which we could do, you could take some of the natural gas that's basically free and Permian base.
• 36:14
  Speaker A: Yeah, right.
• 36:15
  Speaker B: And make the vinyl chloride from it and then go ahead and polymerize into PVC and then sell it to the PVC producers to make whatever mixture they want.
• 36:23
  Speaker A: Right. So you don't have to transport it.
• 36:24
  Speaker B: Right. And you know, you can also make stuff like bleach. You can make stuff these swimming pool shock. So sodium hypochlorite, potassium perchlorate. Potassium perchlorate, sodium hypochlorite. So it's bleach and swing pool chlorine.
• 36:39
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 36:40
  Speaker B: There's also ammonia, ammonia salts, onion chloride salts, which they use those for water purifications. Like the city of Lubbock, I think uses an ammonium, an ammonium chloride based sterilization in their water.
• 36:56
  Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Now I'm going to ask a question and I'm not a chemical person like at all. Microbes, like honestly, those are my favorite animals microbes. And I don't even know because that the. There's unlimited supply of them and there's like no one knows how many there are, what there all are.
• 37:21
  Speaker B: I think there's an infinite amount because there are always new ones being mutating and being formed into whatever.
• 37:27
  Speaker A: So I know that I have had microbiologists tell me that there is a microbe that will eat if there's, if there's a chemical, there's a microbe to eat it.
• 37:40
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 37:41
  Speaker A: So is it possible in theory that you could test this water that is out here in the field? Let's just say hypothetically, this all hypothetical coming from someone who knows nothing about chemistry and only knows the word microbes. So you have on some land that I might own the minerals too. They want to drill and so they start fracking. And now we have all this water and we test this water that comes out and we see here's all of the list of all the things that are in here. And we have identified all the microbes that eat this list of all of these things. Could we grow those microbes, toss them into that water and then they would eat it and clean it up.
• 38:24
  Speaker B: Well, is it that yes and no.
• 38:26
  Speaker A: Of course it's not.
• 38:27
  Speaker B: Well, yes and no. So you would have to then take the microbes out.
• 38:30
  Speaker A: Right.
• 38:30
  Speaker B: Because if they eat it and then die, it's still there.
• 38:32
  Speaker A: Right.
• 38:33
  Speaker B: Doesn't go anywhere. But would it be able to filter them?
• 38:35
  Speaker A: Would you be used are to filter microbes than to filter.
• 38:38
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 38:39
  Speaker A: Things.
• 38:39
  Speaker B: Absolutely. Because they're. They're micro scale.
• 38:41
  Speaker A: Right.
• 38:42
  Speaker B: Critters. Right. You know they're.
• 38:43
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 38:44
  Speaker B: You know, one to maybe ten microns across. Okay.
• 38:49
  Speaker A: You know, there's like, there's like hundreds of thousands of them in like a teaspoon of dirt. So like. Oh yeah, there's lots of them. Yeah.
• 38:55
  Speaker B: So you could absolutely do that. And it's something I've been mulling around a little bit is a way to use some of these to actually concentrate certain kinds of elements from the water.
• 39:08
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 39:08
  Speaker B: So if you grow them in the water.
• 39:10
  Speaker A: See.
• 39:10
  Speaker B: So something I've been thinking about, if you could grow them in the water and then especially if you could get them to export them out of their cell in a. In a reduced form. Meaning that it's metallic. Well, it depends on the element, but. Okay, so something like magnesium, for example, if you could get a bacteria that would take in magnesium, which is not hard to do because magnesium is a central atom in chlorophyll.
• 39:34
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 39:34
  Speaker B: You need magnesium for chlorophyll to.
• 39:36
  Speaker A: Yes, right.
• 39:37
  Speaker B: You know, photosynthesis for anything. Yes, I do know about that.
• 39:41
  Speaker A: I was paying attention then.
• 39:42
  Speaker B: So if you could get it to then take that magnesium and add a couple of electrons to it and spit it out, you would have metallic magnesium. Right. Now to produce. There's different processes, but to produce metallic magnesium you normally have to again, depends on what you start with. But you'll have to generally heat something like magnesium oxide or magnesium chloride to temperatures well over a thousand degrees Celsius. Very energy intensive. And then you've got to, depending on what you're doing, passive for gases or mix other things. And it makes magnesium metal fairly expensive. That's why magnesium is more expensive than say aluminum. It's why we build our airplanes more out of aluminum than out of magnesium.
• 40:23
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 40:24
  Speaker B: So magnesium and aluminum make good alloys and they will add magnesium to the aluminum.
• 40:29
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 40:29
  Speaker B: Because it's actually lighter than aluminum.
• 40:31
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 40:32
  Speaker B: And has different structural properties, of course. But you could theoretically make more stuff that makes a more magnesium based instead of aluminum based and save weight.
• 40:42
  Speaker A: Interesting for similar.
• 40:44
  Speaker B: So that's something I've been. I came up with the idea that would have been in 2016 to start trying to work on that, but I haven't got to. So I did a program at tech called igem. It's a international genetically engineered machines. It's an international competition that we had a group.
• 41:01
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 41:02
  Speaker B: And. And we basically. You have to take a bacteria and engineer it to do something that is super cool. Yeah. So we made it.
• 41:09
  Speaker A: Bacterias are microbes.
• 41:11
  Speaker B: So we were using E. Coli. So a non very safe E. Coli.
• 41:15
  Speaker A: Oh, okay.
• 41:15
  Speaker B: So there's different kinds.
• 41:16
  Speaker A: Not the bad kind, not the pathogenic. Okay. The one in the white hat, not the black hat.
• 41:20
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 41:21
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 41:21
  Speaker B: So you can take the stuff that makes them dangerous out and.
• 41:25
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 41:25
  Speaker B: E. Coli is one of the most studied bacterias there is.
• 41:28
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 41:28
  Speaker B: They use it in labs for everything.
• 41:30
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 41:30
  Speaker B: So we, our group in 2016, we engineered it to produce platelet derived growth factor beta, which is a human derived growth factor that's normally found, I think, in your blood cells.
• 41:43
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 41:43
  Speaker B: Platelet derived growth factor.
• 41:44
  Speaker A: Yes, I've heard of that. Right.
• 41:46
  Speaker B: So we were working on a wound healing model. So we would take collagen and.
• 41:52
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 41:52
  Speaker B: And we would make collagen from the liquid. We would solidify it. And in there we were trying to take these aprotinin. We also produce and PDGF beta drive growth type beta and basically put a little lasso on it, I guess, and hold it on there so it didn't float around your body.
• 42:10
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 42:11
  Speaker B: Because it'll start causing cancer if it's.
• 42:12
  Speaker A: Oh, lovely.
• 42:13
  Speaker B: If there's too much of it everywhere. Right. But you want it.
• 42:16
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 42:16
  Speaker B: Where you want it, where you want it. So the collagen would be a place, a scaffold extracellular matrix for your cells to proliferate up into.
• 42:25
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 42:25
  Speaker B: So if you had a cut or you know, diabetic patients or patients.
• 42:29
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 42:30
  Speaker B: You put this on there and you leave it and it becomes their skin. Because your body normally fills with collagen. That's what your structure is made of usually is elastin and collagen. So this would cut some of the healing time in.
• 42:43
  Speaker A: Oh, wow.
• 42:44
  Speaker B: So that was what we worked on. We. You only had a summer to work on it. Basically we were able to get it to produce PDGF beta, though I'm not sure we did the. I'm not sure we were able to get crystal studies to make sure it was the right confirmation, but we're able to make it produce it. And if that had kept going right now, this was very, very expensive. Like I think a milligram of it is like $10,000.
• 43:08
  Speaker A: Wow.
• 43:09
  Speaker B: Or something. I mean, this would have. It's one of the more expensive things you could buy.
• 43:13
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 43:13
  Speaker B: Out there. So we were able to produce it pretty easily.
• 43:16
  Speaker A: Wow.
• 43:17
  Speaker B: And filter it. So my. My part of it was working on the collagen scaffold itself and a bioreactor to. To be able to go and separate them. And we have a separation process and all. But during that, when we were trying to decide what project we wanted to do, my suggestion was we tried to make magnesium. If you could. Even if you just got it to. To selectively isolate magnesium, that would have been a big improvement. To take it from water. So in Holland, they've got. Their fresh water, has some of the highest magnesium levels in the world. So if you want to produce magnesium, you could turn Holland suddenly into magnesium production facility. And it doesn't take anything bad out of their water.
• 43:56
  Speaker A: Right, Right.
• 43:58
  Speaker B: It wouldn't hurt their water.
• 43:59
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 43:59
  Speaker B: You don't need that much magnesium.
• 44:00
  Speaker A: Right.
• 44:01
  Speaker B: So that was something. Still. I have the back of my mind all the time, but I'm not the molecular biochemist. Right. Like, that's not.
• 44:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 44:10
  Speaker B: So I know a lot about it, but not enough to go and do it.
• 44:13
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 44:13
  Speaker B: Synthetic biologist.
• 44:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. I had a conversation with a guy that said he's just studied microbes and fungus and mushrooms and all of that stuff for so many years, you know. And so we were talking about. He was. He's the one who said there. If there's a chemical, there's a microbe that eats it. And I. It immediately went. In theory, couldn't you do this?
• 44:36
  Speaker B: They're also working. I. We went to a conference in Houston a couple years ago and they. There was a company there. They were. They had already started going to market a little bit with these facilities that you could add it onto the output CO2 from A, you know, burning whatever coal or natural gas, whatever it is in your process, take that CO2. And using different bacteria, they were able to produce things like acetone, acetaldehyde, different solvents.
• 45:06
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 45:06
  Speaker B: And the bacteria itself would eat co. Basically eat CO2 and secrete.
• 45:10
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 45:10
  Speaker B: These other.
• 45:11
  Speaker A: Other elements.
• 45:12
  Speaker B: Other.
• 45:13
  Speaker A: Well, yeah, that was. The other thing is. I thought too. Well, I guess you wouldn't have to just know what they ate. But what are they also going to. What's the. They're going to take this in, but what's the output? And is that going to be a problem with what they put out?
• 45:26
  Speaker B: So if you're trying to just isolate all these elements from it, you'd probably Want them to hold onto it?
• 45:31
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 45:32
  Speaker B: And then you would you filter them out and shred them, basically, and then refine it. So at least you've had it concentrated. So there's more ways than you can imagine to concentrate different elements and different salts and stuff. So that's. It's kind of a daunting task.
• 45:45
  Speaker A: Yes. I. I have been more lost in this conversation than I have been in one in a long time. When I saw chemical engineering, I was like, oh, no. I don't even know if I. I don't even know what. I don't even know. I'm glad you're doing this, though, because I know that there's a lot of produced water and there's a lot of things in it, and the things that are in it and what we're going to do with them is going to mean either we're going to make a mess or we're going to make money.
• 46:16
  Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, why don't make money? Even if. Ideally, if you do this, you don't need the railroad commission to come in and regulate the water issues. The money will follow it there. And where I think probably this will work best is scale.
• 46:34
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 46:35
  Speaker B: So if we can put three or four very large facilities and pipeline on this water to it, that will make it efficient enough to be worth doing.
• 46:43
  Speaker A: Worth doing it.
• 46:44
  Speaker B: If you tried to put this complicated a process at every single disposal site, they're not big enough. But the economies of scale.
• 46:52
  Speaker A: So do you already have the process?
• 46:54
  Speaker B: We're working on it. There's. I'm only one person. So in the process, thousands of things we can make.
• 46:59
  Speaker A: Yeah. Right. So you know what's there and you're trying to figure out, like, what's the process, what's the best process? So now here's a dumb question you're going to have. So in my mind, this is how it looks. I'm going to have a pile of salt. I'm going to have pile lithium. I'm going to have a pile of whatever is. Is that kind of like what you're thinking about? Of it is like more or less.
• 47:23
  Speaker B: So, you know, with, say, lithium, depending on how you want to sell it.
• 47:27
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 47:28
  Speaker B: May need metallic lithium or lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. Those are the sort of the three main ones that get used in battery technologies.
• 47:36
  Speaker A: Right.
• 47:38
  Speaker B: They have to be really high purity to use in those facilities in those processes. I mean, I think with lithium carbonate, depending on the type of battery, you're looking at even a 1% or even maybe a half a percent contamination will start causing you call dendritic growth or dendrites. So you have basically flat or it could be spherical crystals that are.
• 48:03
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 48:04
  Speaker B: They grow into it. And what they do is they go and arc across the electrodes and ruin the, like short out.
• 48:10
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 48:11
  Speaker B: So that you have a little solid will start growing. It'll start.
• 48:13
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 48:14
  Speaker B: It'll start crashing out into a crystal.
• 48:16
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 48:16
  Speaker B: So they had to be really high in purity. Lithium metal, on the other hand, is a little bit easier to purify. So it depends on the.
• 48:23
  Speaker A: So that's. That's the. That's right there. Okay. So do you have to have a process to remove every different chemical, have to move every.
• 48:33
  Speaker B: Every element from.
• 48:35
  Speaker A: Should you say element? Is that what you should say? Is that from.
• 48:38
  Speaker B: Well, so if there's, say, phosph, phosphate, which, you know, use phosphate fertilizers, ideally we want to pull the phosphate out because we can use it that way as opposed to just phosphorus. There may be just phosphorus, literally.
• 48:51
  Speaker A: So that, that, I mean, like, it is so complicated because it's not like desalinization.
• 48:58
  Speaker B: Right.
• 48:58
  Speaker A: You have one element.
• 49:00
  Speaker B: You're taking out just all the salts, basically desalination. You're just taking the water out. You think of it that way.
• 49:05
  Speaker A: That's actually the water out of the salt. Right. You're taking the water out of salts. So that this is like. Now we're. First we're going to take all the salt out. Now we're going to take all the lithium out. Now we're going to. You can't just have one way to filter all of this out at one time.
• 49:23
  Speaker B: No. Well, you can filter it all out at one time, but it's all going to be together.
• 49:27
  Speaker A: Well, yeah. Right, right, right.
• 49:28
  Speaker B: But that doesn't help us.
• 49:29
  Speaker A: Yeah. And then you've got to. Then you have to sort it. It's. Yeah, it's like, sort of like a. Taking everything out of my closet all at once instead of like pulling one thing out, putting it in a box and.
• 49:38
  Speaker B: Yeah, you probably think of it as if I had a, you know, a bucket of skit of sprinkles or all different colors or glitter. Glitter. That's all different colors. And I spread it all around your block.
• 49:48
  Speaker A: Holy.
• 49:48
  Speaker B: And you have to separate all the red ones out and all the purple ones out.
• 49:52
  Speaker A: That is a really good. I was going to go for Skittles, but the glitter, that is a very. Yeah, that really helps with the picture in the mind of what we're dealing with.
• 50:04
  Speaker B: It's immensely Complicated to do.
• 50:06
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 50:06
  Speaker B: It's entirely possible each of those processes already exist in some form or another. So I don't necessarily have to come up with all the new processes, but the old processes.
• 50:15
  Speaker A: But like. Okay, so if you say you have to basically have a place where all of those processes are available in one location.
• 50:23
  Speaker B: Mm. It's going to be a very large sprawling facility.
• 50:29
  Speaker A: I imagine so, yes. And I mean, I've heard 12 to 20 million for a medium siiz facility is what I have heard.
• 50:37
  Speaker B: For what we're imagining, I'm probably going to say closer to a billion dollars to build the facility.
• 50:45
  Speaker A: And we'd probably need more than one.
• 50:46
  Speaker B: Of those, I figure maybe two or three in the apartment basin.
• 50:49
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 50:50
  Speaker B: For that size. The Permian Basin right now. Now some of this water is used for water flooding like we talked about before, to try to push the oil. So they're going to keep injecting it, but permit basin wise, they're pushing a, somewhere between 3 to 5 billion barrels a year back in the ground. So just think about it. If you say you have four of them, you got to deal with a billion barrels a year. So 42 billion gallons a year. Of water.
• 51:15
  Speaker A: Of water.
• 51:15
  Speaker B: And then you got to pick at it sort of. And you have to deal with the solids that come in because it's not just water. There'll be sand, there's, you know, different kinds of silts and that's a little gravel. There's all kinds of solids that are in there. Sand is a big one that potentially you can find use for, but you got to decontaminate.
• 51:33
  Speaker A: So do you have any idea, like, let's just say what is the average amount of these elements? Like on average there's 20 different. Or on average there's 100 different. Or on average there's a thousand difference.
• 51:46
  Speaker B: As far as ones that we'll care about. That'll be high enough concentration to mess with.
• 51:50
  Speaker A: Yes. Right. Okay.
• 51:51
  Speaker B: Probably 30 to 50 at the most.
• 51:55
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 51:56
  Speaker B: So, you know, if there's so cobalt, for example.
• 51:59
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 52:00
  Speaker B: Be really nice if a cobalt was in that water, but it's not going to be. The solubility of cobalt is so low, even with different extra elements added in. Unless the water comes in really acidic or has some, some chelation agent essentially in it that makes that able to float around the water, it's not going to be there.
• 52:17
  Speaker A: So is it possible that as all this water comes in, that some of these. Because it's going to be coming in from all different areas so that some of these elements will dilute.
• 52:28
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 52:28
  Speaker A: Even more and more.
• 52:29
  Speaker B: And that'll be one of the things we have to worry about and decide is, do we commingle all the water and try to have a consistent concentration? Which is probably the route I'll go. Because it's a lot easier to design for a known input than to design a facility that can handle, you know, a thousand different concentrations of each thing. That would be really. Now, I'm not saying it's impossible. The way we're working on growing AI that can work in process control, it would be entirely possible for it to be able to predict what needs to happen.
• 53:02
  Speaker A: Well, I can see it because. See here, right here. So I vision it. I vision it as a lumberyard. So the log comes in and it is measured like in milliseconds at thousands of points. And then it tells the saw exactly how to cut it. What's the most. How you get the most money out of that single log through what cuts. And then it spins it and turns it around and gets it in the right position and cuts it.
• 53:27
  Speaker B: You know, it's possible. It just. The thing is that some things at different concentrations, that process won't work at a low concentration or a high concentration.
• 53:36
  Speaker A: Right.
• 53:37
  Speaker B: So what I. Depending on what we're doing. So if you're using membranes for parts of it, like, like an RO membrane you may have in your house, there's different stages of it, of course. There's the. The stages for like nano filtration. Ultra filtration.
• 53:49
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 53:50
  Speaker B: As opposed to RO filtration. Those actually are able to sell separate ions based on charge. So if you remember back to chemistry, your periodic table.
• 54:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, but okay, your.
• 54:01
  Speaker B: Your first column has.
• 54:02
  Speaker A: Oh, yes.
• 54:03
  Speaker B: A plus one charge and second column plus two charge.
• 54:05
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 54:06
  Speaker B: So there's different.
• 54:07
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 54:07
  Speaker B: Valence electron numbers of it when it's dissolved in water. So things in that first column, like sodium, lithium, potassium, in a nano filtration membrane should be pushed in one stream and everything else into another stream. So it's possible to do some separations that way with selective. On size and. And on the physical size of the element and on the charge of the element. So a lot of that can be done that way. But when you go through those membranes, you can't have really high concentrations to begin with.
• 54:37
  Speaker A: Right.
• 54:38
  Speaker B: You've got. That's why you have what you call recycle stream and a lot of RO systems. It'll take the clean water and mix it with the concentrated water coming in and you have.
• 54:47
  Speaker A: Right, right. It Dilutes it down to the right amount that it can deal with.
• 54:51
  Speaker B: So if you're using that, you don't want it concentrated. But if we want to use something where we try to crash stuff out with temperature or by adding, you know, something to. To make it crash out, another. Another salt that will, you know, push. So if you had, like, if you had a lot of lithium chloride dissolved in the water, in. In water, and you added a lot of sodium carbonate.
• 55:18
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 55:18
  Speaker B: So like, kind of like baking soda, but. Yes, it's similar to baking soda, but if you add a lot of that to the water, you'll crash out lithium carbonate.
• 55:28
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 55:28
  Speaker B: Because the lithium carbonate is less soluble than sodium carbonate.
• 55:31
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 55:32
  Speaker B: Right. So you can add stuff to. To crash it out and have a solid that you can then go and physically filter out.
• 55:38
  Speaker A: We're going to call this episode chemistry. Not 101, 102. Yes. At least. And I. I missed 101 completely.
• 55:49
  Speaker B: So, you know, things like that, you want high concentrations.
• 55:52
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 55:53
  Speaker B: You know, whether. If you want to do it, temperature. So part of the reason you get a lot of scale buildup if you have high concentrations of salt in your water at home and you get scale buildup on certain surfaces is partly like in your hot water heater.
• 56:08
  Speaker A: Yes. Your water heater will fill with your Lubbock.
• 56:10
  Speaker B: Yes. Your water heater will fill with gunk, Right?
• 56:14
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 56:14
  Speaker B: So a lot of things, like calcium carbonate, which is what coral is made of, that's their main skeleton, calcium carbonate, it is less soluble as the water gets hot. Right. You think of, like when you dissolve sugar in your tea or something, if it's hotter water, you can dissolve more sugar. And that's how most things work. But some things are the opposite. And so hot surfaces, like the element in your hot water heater, it precipitates on the surface because it's hotter right there than the rest of it. Right. So that's a method you can use for crashing certain things out, is make it hotter, colder, depending on your concentration.
• 56:53
  Speaker A: So I think that to sum it all up, this is going to take a lot of research and a lot of work, a lot of money and a lot of money. But according to Senator Perry, we're going to make it happen.
• 57:08
  Speaker B: Good.
• 57:09
  Speaker A: So he is. He is very passionate about it and getting this produced water, making it available.
• 57:17
  Speaker B: So sounds like somebody need to get in contact with.
• 57:20
  Speaker A: Yes, for sure. Yeah. You need to listen to the podcast and. Yeah, he's. He's really been a big advocate for us and for water, like, really bringing that. Why we have to bring it to people's attention, I don't know. But he has done that, you know, so.
• 57:35
  Speaker B: Got to get the public behind you.
• 57:37
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, yeah. And the legislature. And he's done a lot of work there, there, too, so. Well, this has really been very, very enlightening. I feel like I have been to school today and I enjoyed it. I always like to learn things, but now people are going to know how dumb I really am. Well, folks, I hope you've enjoyed this conversation with Eric Denton. Eric, thanks for being here.
• 58:05
  Speaker B: Of course. Thanks for having me on.
• 58:06
  Speaker A: Yeah. If you like what you hear and you feel like you're learning something, we'd love for you to give us a share, give us a. Like, you can even go to our website and donate if you would like to do so. All of the information and Eric's information will all be available in the show notes. I'm your host, Hilary Tibman Sims, and I look forward to being with you again on another episode of Conservation Stories.