For me to have smelled that sweet odor twice yesterday (Saturday 7/30 at 10:30 am and at 12:30 noon)…I wonder who is fracing near me?
Or is it the UT Arlington glycol units?
Or is it all those mom and pop paint shops that TCEQ can’t help me with cause most are too small to be regulated?
Or can it be the GM plant?
Or is it the GM gas wells? I see a derrick up.
Or is it just a lot of vehicle traffic emissions?
Or is it the cumulative effect of all these sources? TCEQ doesn’t regulate cumulative multiple doses-who knows if 1+1=5 (a synergistic effect)?
It sucks when you have so many sources you can’t bust anybody on it….the city needs a strict air quality ordinance, police these places, and $$$ fine them…that’s how the city needs to continue making money after this shale is played out.
I think some of the sweet smell is glycol ethers. On a suma test during a sweet episode outside my front door (10/2010), my ethylene was 1.5 ppb and my benzene was .21 ppb. Another thing that showed up was methyl chloride at .96 ppb which has a sweet odor too.
Too bad TCEQ doesn’t screen for methanol cause that has a slightly sweet odor. I hope our drillers in Arlington are using a flash tank separator-condenser. This new technology is to be used prior to the glycol solution reaching the boiler so it prevents the methanol from venting out of the boiler. Who can find out if Carrizo and Chesapeake uses flash tank separators-condensers? That would be a good item to mandate in our gas drilling ordinance.
On the fracfocus website for the Pleasant Ridge site, Chesapeake puts down the wells… glycol ethers for their cross linkers & scale inhibitors (should be what’s in those white barrels). They also use methanol as the corrosion inhibitor.
Another thing TCEQ doesn’t screen for is diethylene glycol (DEG) or triethylene glycol (TEG). This is the solution generally used in glycol dehydrators, but until TCEQ screens for it I don’t know what ppb we are breathing.
I started looking at glycol ethers cause we had a complaint in Dalworthington Gardens a couple of weeks ago of a sickly, sweet smell. It was reported to me that Dakota Lee admitted that they (DFW Midstream compressor station) opened up the glycol units that night and vented to the atmosphere when they changed their filters. Others were complaining too of a sweet odor, and so they are going to start using the charcoal filters. One thing that doesn’t jive on that story though …the engines were loud that evening it smelled sweet and the next day the site was shut down -dead quiet-after the complaint was called in. If they changed their filters leaving the engines (compressors? glycol units?) running, then why shut it down the next day? Doesn’t a shut down then require a full blowdown event and release everything in those pipes to the atmosphere in order to restart the compressors? I’m confused.
One thing I’m glad about is that the recent EPA proposals taget those glycol units cause they spew benzene- a known carcinogen.
The EPA has a cure for those glycol units…
Arlington TX Barnett Shale Blogger 