Hydraulic Fracturing Disclosure Becomes the Law in Texas

Texas is now the first state with a law requiring upstream oil companies to publicly disclose the chemicals they use when extracting oil and gas from dense shale formations.
The natural-gas industry, bowing to longtime pressure, will disclose more information about the chemicals it uses for hydraulic fracturing.

Several other state agencies have regulations forcing some disclosure, but none have made it law. Texas’ law will force oil and gas companies to post the chemicals and the amounts used beginning in July 2012.

The relatively new drilling method for natural gas extraction—known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking—carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting large amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressure to break up rock formations and release gas deposits. Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material. The issue has taken on national importance as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is used in more states to extract once out-of-reach hydrocarbons from impermeable shale formations.

Locus designed its Environmental Information Management (EIM) software specifically to meet the hydro fracturing industry’s needs for managing subsurface and water quality data.
Locus expanded our software offerings to manage and visualize water, waste, wastewater, drilling fluids, radionuclides and air emissions more effectively online. With Texas law in place and other states probably to follow soon, Locus felt that the market needed an off-the-shelf tool to manage hydrofracking data. Locus’s software provides any natural gas production site that has a need for data management and reporting—and almost all have—the necessary functionality to meet these requirements.

Environmental groups worry the chemicals could contaminate aquifers and water supplies while the industry says the process is safe. There is only one way to prove it and that is to disclose data. And that is what Texas law will require. The Texas law will require companies to make public the chemicals they use on every hydraulic fracturing job in the state. Texas law is significant because oil and gas drilling is a key industry in the state and the industry vocally supported the measure.

Earlier this year many big gas producers said they would begin voluntarily publicizing the chemicals online at FracFocus.org. The site states that groundwater protection is the “Priority Number One”. Oil and natural gas producers have stringent requirements for how wells must be completed to protect groundwater. The genesis of these requirements is water safety. Casing is the first line of defense used to protect freshwater aquifers. Locus’ EIM database stores groundwater chemistry information for over 400,000 groundwater monitoring wells that can be easily screened online for contaminants of concern and prove the case that hydrofracking is safe when used properly.

The hydrofracking industry has been in the spotlight in recent months and Locus wanted to provide this sector with a tool to prove its case to the public and regulators that natural gas production using hydrofracking can be done safely and transparently without jeopardizing drinking water supplies.

Roca Honda Resources, LLC Selects Locus’ Cloud Software

Roca Honda Resources to manage environmental data in EIM

SAN FRANCISCO, California, June 6, 2011 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based water, energy, and environmental software, announced today that it has been awarded a contract to manage environmental data for Roca Honda Resources, LLC (“RHR”).

RHR, headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a joint venture between Sumitomo Corporation, Sumitomo Corporation of America and Strathmore Resources, US Ltd. Located in the Grants Mineral District of New Mexico, the Roca Honda uranium development project is one of the largest and highest-grade proposed uranium mines in the United States in more than 30 years.

“Locus’ software is a powerful tool for organizing, evaluating and visualizing large volumes of environmental data,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “We are very pleased that Roca Honda Resources recognizes the value of EIM in managing its environmental data and is incorporating it as an integral part of its operations.”

“Developing our resources prudently and efficiently, while identifying and managing potential environmental impacts related to our operations, are critically important to Roca Honda Resources. Locus’ software will allow us to share information more quickly and efficiently between our field operations and our scientists, and evaluate data faster, ultimately contributing to a more environmentally sound management practice and efficient operation,” said Mr. John DeJoia, Senior Vice President of New Mexico operations and Manager of Roca Honda Resources, LLC.

Initially, Locus will be deployed to manage data for the Roca Honda site. However, Mr. DeJoia also expressed an interest in investigating the potential use of Locus’ software at other sites in the future.

Groundwater Monitoring From Space

New York Times reported that scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.

They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry.

Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.

According to the findings from October 2003 to March 2010, aquifers under the California’s Central Valley were drawn down by 25 million acre-feet — almost enough to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.

For decades, groundwater measurements in the United States had been made from points on the Earth’s surface — by taking real-time soundings at 1,383 of the United States Geological Survey’s observation wells and daily readings at 5,908 others. Those readings are supplemented by measuring water levels in hundreds of thousands of other wells, trenches and excavations. But now the satellite technology allows the real time monitoring from space. This may be the best data about groundwater that is available. Harvesting and disseminating all of the information about aquifers as they dry up and shortages loom is the best use of space technology.

Separating groundwater from other kinds of moisture affecting gravity requires a little calculation and the inclusion of information on precipitation and surface runoff obtained from surface studies or computer models.

Because the climate change is first going to be felt on water shortages the groundwater needs to be managed carefully. We have population growth, we have widespread groundwater contamination, and we satellites showing us we are depleting most of groundwater.

EPA proposes stricter water quality controls for wetlands, creeks, and other water bodies

EPA will impose stricter pollution controls on wetlands and streams.

The new guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency, which will be codified in a federal regulation later this year, could prevent the dumping of mining waste and the discharge of industrial pollutants to waters that feed creeks, lakes, and drinking water supplies. The specific restriction will depend on the waterway.

The question of which isolated streams and wetlands qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act has been in dispute for a decade. The EPA policy change is likely to affect tributaries flowing into water bodies such as the San Francisco Bay. Once finalized, the regulations will apply federal water quality standards to a range of waterways, including the headwaters of lakes and rivers as well as intermittent streams.

The new regulations will require companies to better manage their water quality data to avoid fines and to demonstrate that they are not polluting water bodies. Locus EIM software provides of-the- shelf cloud-based tool to accomplish this.

Locus Introduces iPhone Application for Field Environmental Data Collection

Locus offers another industry-first application for environmental data collection

SAN FRANCISCO, California, March 28, 2011 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based energy, environmental, and emissions information management software, announced today a new iPhone application for field data collection. eWell for the iPhone consists of two linked components: the iPhone application itself, and Locus’ Environmental Information ManagementTM (EIM) web-based application. Data are collected using the iPhone and the data provisioning setup is performed in EIM. Once data are collected, they are wirelessly transmitted to EIM for review and reporting.

Using EIM, eWell users can map the routes for checking a series of wells that need to be sampled, and/or those that they need water levels and other field parameters measured. They can download these routes to the iPhone, along with selected historical environmental data on their wells, for use in the field for real-time validation and QA/QC of collected data. Once downloaded to eWell, the routes and well locations can be seen and accessed directly from the iPhone’s Google Maps interface.

Once in the field, customers can use their iPhones, iPod Touches, or iPads to record water levels, pH, turbidity, and other environmental readings, as well as to compare current and past readings. Where Wi-Fi or 3G coverage is available, data collected in the field uploads instantly to EIM. Where access is unavailable, users save the collected data automatically, which can then be uploaded when coverage becomes available. eWell for the iPhone completely streamlines the data upload and download processes, eliminating any steps that require equipment synchronization.

“The release of this new iPhone/iPod/iPad version of eWell adds yet another powerful tool to Locus’ arsenal of web-based technologies for lowering the cost of environmental data collection and management. For information that cannot be collected through interfaces to other applications, such as from analytical laboratories LIMS systems, data historians or wireless sensors, eWell offers a powerful alternative that eliminates duplicate input, reduces transcription time, performs data checks and validation at point of collection, and maintains a complete audit trail, including the georefererence on who did what, when, and where,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO Locus Technologies.

Once in EIM’s data review tables, users can review uploaded data for accuracy and completeness. After completing all data validation checks, field readings are moved to liveEIM for reporting and other project uses. EIM is part of Locus’ ePortal SaaS platform.

“The smart phone-based eWell represents another milestone for applying mobile Web 2.0 technologies to the business world. Locus will continue expanding this popular platform to include field data collection for energy, carbon, resource consumption, and other sustainability information. As is the case for all other applications that Locus has pioneered over last decade, eWell is designed to lower a company’s environmental expenditures while improving data quality,” added Duplan.

Locus first released eWell in 2000 on the PalmTM, and was the environmental industry’s first wireless Internet application for recording and transmitting environmental data in the field.

The eWell iPhone app is available for download from the Apple, Inc. App Store immediately for $19.95. Over the course of 2011, Locus will introduce eWell on other smart phone platforms, including Android.

Locus Technologies Awarded Contract to Manage Los Alamos National Laboratory Environmental Information and Data

Locus SaaS software to manage data for nation’s largest laboratory

SAN FRANCISCO, California and LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, March 21, 2011  — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based environmental software, announced today that it has been awarded a contract from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to manage LANL’s environmental data in Locus’ Cloud. The contract is worth up to $2 million from 2011 through an additional four option years.

LANL is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security (LANS), located in Los Alamos, N.M. The 37-square-mile laboratory is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world; it conducts multidisciplinary research for fields such as national security, outer space, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing. LANL is one of two laboratories in the United States at which the government conducts classified work toward the design of nuclear weapons.

The Locus EIM software will help LANL organize and manage its future environmental compliance and monitoring activities using SaaS. By centralizing the data collected during current remediation and surveillance efforts, Locus’ EIM software will enable the facility to more efficiently address legacy site contamination, both chemical and radioactive, across multiple locations. EIM will allow Los Alamos to take a better aggregate view of its environmental challenges and make better planning decisions for environmental stewardship.

Activities that EIM will organize include environmental data of all media types, comparison of historical contamination levels; planning and performing sampling, processing, and analysis of environmental media; providing institutional coordination, integration, and communication of all environmental monitoring activities, data, and documentation; implementing regulatory and action standards and policy with line organizations; and interacting with government agencies, stakeholders, the public, and Indian tribes on environmental resource management issues.

Locus designed its EIM software specifically to meet challenging water-quality management issues, covering both analytical chemistry and the management of radionuclides data in a complex hydro-geological setting. EIM will also provide a web-based GIS system for Los Alamos data that will be available to the general public, bringing ease of use and complete transparency to complex data sets.

“With more than 37 square miles of complex geology and hydrogeology, Los Alamos National Laboratory is home to 14 major canyon systems that affect the Rio Grande, and the complexity and size of Los Alamos operations make environmental compliance a top priority. We are very proud that LANL has determined that EIM has the robust functionality to meet the facility’s formidable data management requirements. After the National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford (SLAC), Los Alamos is the second U.S. Department of Energy site to be managed in EIM. We are very excited to work with LANL’s talented team of professionals on this important long term project,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

LANL has created byproduct waste since the 1940s. Its past practices for disposing of waste, while meeting the standards of the day, are not up to today’s standards. Investigations, cleanup, and remediation are now under way, and the Lab has dramatically reduced its waste generation from ongoing work.

“High-quality environmental data is one of the key drivers that will help us meet our cleanup goals,” said Alison Dorries, division leader for the Lab’s Waste and Environmental Services organization. “Moving forward, our data will help us be more sustainable and better stewards of the environment. Organizing these massive volumes of data, and making them available to the public, will help demonstrate our commitment to openness and environmental compliance.”

 

ABOUT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and URS for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

LANL news media contact: Fred deSousa, (505) 665-3430, fdesousa@lanl.gov

Locus to Present at Cleantech Forum San Francisco, March 15-17, 2011

Organizing Enterprise Sustainability and Water Information in the Cloud

EIM Software to Manage Hydro Fracturing Data

Locus Technologies has expanded its flagship product EIM to manage data and information for natural gas exploration and production sites that use hydro fracturing technologies to extract gas from shale.

The relatively new drilling method for natural gas extraction — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting large amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas. Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material. According to recent NY Times article, there were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990. Around 90 percent have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the drilling industry.

For the natural gas industry to stay in compliance with ever stricter laws to protect drinking water supplies and air emissions, drilling companies need software tools to organize hydrofracking waste data in order to demonstrate to the public and regulators that hydrofracking activities are not endangering natural resources. They also need to prove that any dangerous waste from the wells is handled in compliance with state and federal laws. Although hydrofracking has been used for decades, the technology has become more powerful and more widely used in recent years, producing far more wastewater and attracting much more public and regulatory scrutiny.

Nearly all of the activities associated with hydrocracking, including the assessment of site characteristics, the ongoing monitoring of site conditions and air emissions, and the remediation of adverse environmental impacts, involve the collection and/or analysis of large quantities of data. The specialized software to organize, manage, validate, visualize, store, and report this information formerly did not exist until Locus expanded its award winning, web-based EIM software to provide industry with the necessary tools to do so.

This expanded module in EIM was specifically designed to meet the hydrofracturing industry’s needs for managing subsurface and water quality data that include both analytical chemistry, waste, and radionuclides. Since EIM has been deployed in the Cloud for over ten years at many similar oil and gas exploration sites and nuclear facilities nationwide, the system provides for rapid deployment, an unmatched level of functionality and data security, an extensive set of QC/QC standards, and scalability.

The hydrofracking industry has been in the spotlight in recent months and Locus wanted to provide this business sector with a tool to prove its case to the public and regulators that natural gas production using hydrofacking can be done safely and transparently. As such, we expanded our software offerings to manage and visualize water, waste, wastewater, drilling fluids, radionuclides and air emissions more effectively over the web.  We felt that the market needed an off-the-shelf tool targeted to manage hydrofracking data, being that is subject to a different set of state and federal regulatory guidance. Locus’s software provides any natural gas production site that has a need for data management and reporting—and almost all have—the necessary functionality to meet these requirements.

Water quality and waste management are not the only issues at hydrofracking sites. Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Locus ePortal software when combined with EIM provides a comprehensive compliance solution for the natural gas industry to manage contaminants in all media ( water, soil, and air) in a single, integrated  system through a Single Sign On (SSO).

EIM, Locus’ Environmental Information Management software, is the world’s largest commercial on-demand environmental data management system. EIM completely replaces existing stand-alone data systems and reporting tools to provide a comprehensive integrated solution to one of the environmental industries’ most vexing problems – the centralization and management of complex data pertaining to contaminated water, groundwater, soil, and/or air. EIM provides for the complete electronic processing of analytical data, beginning with the upload of electronic data deliverables from labs, and terminating in state-mandated or federal regulatory exports and reporting. EIM is deployed through Software as a Service (SaaS) model that eliminates most of the difficulties associated with the adoption of a new technology, while offering the opportunity for more rapid customization to meet the ever-changing needs of its user population. The system currently stores over 120 million records for over 15,000 sites worldwide.

Water Quality: EPA to Modify Chemical Limits for Perchlorate and Chromium 6 in Drinking Water

On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, the Obama administration outlined a more aggressive approach to curbing levels of certain chemicals in drinking water, saying it will develop a legal nationwide maximum for one chemical and signaling a separate effort to set new limits for other substances.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced that they would be moving from an advisory guideline to a mandatory limit for perchlorate, a chemical often associated with rocket fuel. The EPA also will be advancing a separate effort to set new limits for 16 other chemicals in drinking water. The Agency is particularly concerned about the substance known as chromium 6, or hexavalent chromium.

More recently, laboratory tests commissioned by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found chromium 6 in tap water from 31 of 35 U.S. cities, with the highest levels in Norman, Okla.; Honolulu; and Riverside, Calif.

The EPA move to set its first-ever perchlorate standard comes after years of bureaucratic struggle with the Defense Department. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that 53 Defense Department installations had perchlorate at levels above a current advised limit of 15 parts per billion.

The Defense Department has already taken action beyond initial sampling at 48 of the 53 facilities, including some steps to remediate any contamination.

A group that includes defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and perchlorate maker American Pacific Corp. challenged the EPA in a press release later Wednesday, saying that so far, no research has shown an adverse effect in humans exposed to perchlorate. The group, calling itself the Perchlorate Information Bureau, also said that perchlorate hadn’t shown up in public drinking water at levels that represent a public-health risk.

The problem could be present at more Defense Department sites than currently are being monitored, if the EPA decides that an even tougher standard is warranted. The NRDC says that a level of one part per billion is appropriate, compared with the EPA’s current advisory level of 15 parts per billion. Regulators have been studying perchlorate for more than a decade. California first required public water systems to monitor for the chemical in 1999.

 

Locus Introduces Augmented Reality to Integrated Portal for Environmental, Energy, Water, Resource, and Emissions Management

Locus Expands ePortal to Address a Growing Need for Environmental Enterprise Resource Planning (EERP)

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 6 December 2010  — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced today new and expanded features and functionalities of ePortal, its award winning software platform for environmental and energy information management. This fifth generation version of the platform introduces a new Rich Internet Application (RIA)-based user interface that provides enhanced usability, improved work flows, and Augmented Reality (AR).

ePortal now provides customers with a single integrated portal platform to capture, organize, visualize, and report all key facility environmental information in a central, enterprise database offered in the cloud. The platform enables simplified work flows and advanced visualization that includes AR to create individualized views of information across media and resources. With the use of the ePortal software clients can manage all aspects of their regulatory compliance, energy and water usage, water quality, air emissions, GHG reporting, health and safety and much more. In short, ePortal provides the most advanced approach to the complex EERP challenges that face many companies today.

Locus’ ePortal is built around the familiar Conceptual Site Model (CSM). By design, CSM is multidisciplinary and encompasses both legacy and ongoing information about a site or facility. It can be viewed as a cube drawn around a site, part of which is underground and part above ground. All relevant inputs to and outputs from the cube are monitored and recorded. On the input side, utilities such as electricity, gas, and water, and raw materials are tracked. Outputs include air, water, and soil discharges and waste. Equipment within the cube such as boilers, stacks, tanks, and so forth become assets that have various attributes that must be recorded, stored, and often reported on.

For companies that adopt ePortal, it becomes the enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard for managing the many aspects of the sustainable enterprise. It synthesizes and crystallizes what is already known about a site or facility and augments that information with ongoing monitoring and reporting. Companies are able to report and forecast the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in real time across multiple hierarchical views. ePortal brings Augmented Reality to CSM.

Using Locus’ CSM-based approach, clients can take a more holistic view of their enterprise, enabling them to reduce both their compliance expenditures and their operational costs. In particular, ePortal provides enterprise tools to reduce and optimize consumption of various resources to lower GHG emissions and encourage more sustainable growth. Simplification of facility management based on a CSM approach recognizes that businesses need a flexible, easy to understand, multi-media solution in today’s multi-regulatory world. Locus’ CSM-based environmental portal provides the tools to quantify environmental liabilities, manage sustainability and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, report water footprint, organize compliance and Health and Safety (H&S) records, accurately report to regulators, and run what-if analysis to facilitate forecasting.

“The increased sophistication of the corporate customer, combined with the recent challenging economic climate has fueled the need for easy to use integrated solutions that allow fewer people to manage more using less. That was the driving force behind ePortal’s recent update, which provides a single software solution, across the various regulated media. Historically, many companies have built silo applications that deal with one or a few reporting requirements and associated data management needs. In fact, some companies have been building software solutions in this space for over a decade. But what has been lacking in the market space is an integrated solution that brings many if not all environmental, energy, water and other compliance and consumption requirements under a single portal infrastructure and Single Sign On (SSO) on the web. What industry wants and needs is an integrated system similar to ERP that would manage all their environmental, energy, water, and other sustainability needs. That is exactly what we have built and are happy to offer it to our clients,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.