Public Lab Research note


Identifying Wells in Field and Experiment Design

by megan | August 08, 2012 00:04 08 Aug 00:04 | #3182 | #3182

Field Identification of Wells and Experiment Design Thursday July 26th Length of Experiment: 7/26/2012- 8/1/2012

On 7/26 myself and fellow RISD student Rachelle met with Josh from San Juan Citizens Alliance.

Equipment: Sara had shipped out 30 film canisters with strips already pre-cut and placed inside ready to go.

Josh had rented a Gas Badge Plus for $20 a day from Safety Alliance in Farmington, (505)-325-7233

I have included this link to information on the Gas Badge Plus http://www.durawear.com/index.cfm/a/catalog.prodShow/vid/485/catid/145

Josh had also rented an infrared camera to experiment with. I am pretty sure it was the FLIR i7 Infrared Camera
http://go-infrared.com/i7.php

We also had sticky mailing labels to label the containers, scissors and duct tape. We had camera, and an app to tell us GPS coordinates. (A side note, if relying on this, make sure the information is consistent (i.e. degrees or decimals) and note that Iphone compass is ALWAYS wrong)

Before we went out to the site, we stopped at the hardware store and picked up some 14 gauge wire and a pair of wire cutters. We wanted something inconspicuous to attach the containers to.

Field Identification of Aztec Sites proved to be fairly easy, all active well sites were labeled with the Name, Well # and API_Number. Sites 423, 424 and 425 were identified as follows. It should also be noted that all these were the only wells listed in this section as "PRODUCING" and they were also the only wells with grasshoppers on them. It should be noted that we smelt H2S at all three of the test sites. But SR1 and SUL where the strongest.

We set 10 containers on each site. We wanted to understand how light affected the strips as well the difference in air flow, so we set out five containers vertical with the opening to the bottom (we put some a thin piece of tape over the bottom, but this proved to be unnecessary, they stayed in just fine without it.) and five containers horizontal. We knew the prevailing winds on sight were going East, so we set most of the containers to the East of the well, with a few around the rest of the well.

We set up all containers in the car first so it was an easy install. We labeled each one with a mailing label on the side (SR1.1 or SUL8) and fixed it to the wire with duct tape. We noted which containers were place vertically and which were placed horizontally and we made a map of container placement around well. We took pictures of each site, with Iphone camera and infrared camera and we also took lat and long for each site.

Controls: We set up three controls, one on site, keeping the container closed and two at my house, where there is no H2S, open containers, one horizontal and one vertical.

LINK to GOOGLE MAP: https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=203794360311850514876.0004c6b5919014999ee95


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