At work this week

It was unusually stressful at work this week! My boss was gone, and so were the other two managers under him, leaving me as the only manager for the entire compliance & enforcement section. I barely know enough to do my own job with their help – much less do their jobs without any help.

All was fine until late on Tuesday afternoon when I got a complaint call from a member of the public who lives near one of the big gas plants. She said the “fire was out” and it “smelled really bad” of “rotten eggs.” Translation – she was smelling hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and the flare did not seem to be burning.

In high amounts, H2S is a very dangerous, lethal gas. Was the flare really out? Was some sort of huge pubic health catastrophe unfolding? Or was this just a routine complaint call? (Because, lets face it, gas plants stink.) We get complaint calls about this particular plant all the time, because for whatever dumb reason, the local planners allowed a subdivision to be built immediately across the highway from the plant. There’s not much for planning departments in rural New Mexico. (Note to self – never by a house near a gas plant for any reason, ever.)

My agency tracks and monitors routine air emissions for the long-term, overall health of the environment (and people in the environment). We aren’t set up to deal with emergencies. And presumably the safety controls, which are mandated and overseen by other agencies, were in place – realtime monitors, alarms, etc. Presumably in a real emergency the alarms would be going off, triggering an emergency response from the local emergency services.

Presumably. But still. The flare was out? Some flares are only used when needed (emergency flares). But this flare was supposed to be running 24-7.

So we set about trying to contact someone at the plant. But since we handle routine emissions reporting, our contacts are usually at the company headquarters, not the actual facilities. We figured we could ask someone at the company headquarters for a local contact at the plant, but in this case, the company was headquartered in Texas. It was 4:30 pm in New Mexico, which is 5:30 in Texas. Would we even be able to reach anyone?

I’m brand new, I know next to nothing about gas plants, and I’ve got to figure out how to react to this.  I needed staff from other teams to help. They were understandably a little reluctant to do anything out of ordinary, because their bosses were gone and they have their procedures and processes in place and they didn’t want to deviate from those. Their process generally involve taking a few days to look into the issue, familiarize themselves with the permit, check to see if there are other complaints logged in the recent past, check to see if the company has recently reported excess emissions, make some inquires, etc., because we do routine monitoring, not emergency response.

We do have one staff member who is located out that way (a long way from Santa Fe), and it was suggested to me that we send him out to take a look. But he works for the monitoring section, which doesn’t tend to overlap much with our compliance and enforcement section. I figured it didn’t hurt to try, so I approached his boss, who said, no way. It wasn’t part of his job description, he wasn’t qualified, he didn’t have protective equipment, and what would he do anyway?

I just really wanted to reach someone at the plant to figure out what’s going on! So somebody obligingly put out an email, while others were searching for phone numbers. It turned out that an employee at the plant saw the email on his cell phone almost immediately, and got right back to us.

He said the flare isn’t out. Whew. That’s a relief, but what’s going on? Why are we getting reports that the flare’s out?

Turns out that when an acid gas injector unit* goes down (isn’t working for whatever reason), and a higher than normal percentage of H2S is therefore being flared off, the flare burns at a different temperature, causing a low bluish flame, which can be invisible against the sky. This made it look to the public like the flare was out. And, because the process isn’t perfect, they could smell small amounts of H2S.

A difficult week for everyone!

*Technical notes in case you’re curious:

An acid gas injector sends the acid gas back into the ground. If a plant produces small amounts of acid gas (H2S and CO2) it can be relatively cheaply injected back into the ground. More advanced and expensive processing can convert the H2S into sulfur or better yet, sulfuric acid, which has retail value. This particular plant has been encountering an increasingly high percentage sour gas, which contains H2S. The terms “sour” gas and “acid” gas mean almost the same thing. “Sour” gas has H2S in it, acid gas is any type of acidic gas, such as H2S, or CO2, etc.

Because the components of the incoming gas to this particular plant are changing, they will probably need to upgrade their processes, which will be very expensive. But they can’t just go on flaring it all off, because that process emits SO2 (sulfur dioxide). SO2 is one of the six “criteria” air pollutants that are regulated by EPA (and thus, by us).

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On a more amusing note, I was in the “Friday Family Foto” yesterday. Every morning everyone gets an email with an environmental newsletter attached. The staff who send it out usually add a comic from the internet (usually dogs or cats with funny captions). On Fridays, instead of pulling something from online, they send out pet photos they’ve collected from us, and write their own captions.