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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The water coming out of your faucet is safe to drink, but that doesn't mean it's completely clean. Chlorine has long been the standard for water treatment, but it often contains trace levels of disinfection byproducts and unknown contaminants. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed the minus approach to handle these harmful byproducts.
Instead of relying on traditional chemical addition (known as the plus approach), the minus approach avoids disinfectants, chemical coagulants, and advanced oxidation processes typical to water treatment processes. It uses a unique mix of filtration methods to remove byproducts and pathogens, enabling water treatment centers to use ultraviolet light and much smaller doses of chemical disinfectants to minimize future bacterial growth down the distribution system.
"The minus approach is a groundbreaking philosophical concept in water treatment," said Yongsheng Chen, the Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman IV Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Its primary objective is to achieve these outcomes while minimizing the reliance on chemical treatments, which can give rise to various issues in the main water treatment stream."
Chen and his student Elliot Reid, the primary author, presented the minus approach in the paper, "The Minus Approach Can Redefine the Standard of Practice of Drinking Water Treatment," in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.
The minus approach physically separates emerging contaminants and disinfection byproducts from the main water treatment process using these already proven processes:
The minus approach is intended to engage the water community in designing safer, more sustainable, and more intelligent systems. Because its technologies are already available and proven, the minus approach can be implemented immediately.
Journal information: Environmental Science & Technology
More information: Elliot Reid et al, The Minus Approach Can Redefine the Standard of Practice of Drinking Water Treatment, Environmental Science & Technology (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.2c09389
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday September 16 2023, @06:18AM (7 children)
You're probably right. All I know is it's very very fine, almost like commercial Bentonite, and came from down to 400' depth. Packs in very nicely, and seems to clot, even when wet, like bentonite. I don't know the geology below, nor have I had any analysis done. It'd be interesting to know what it is though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday September 16 2023, @06:46AM (6 children)
Bentonite goes down the hole during the drilling process, but a great deal of it comes back up. That's probably what you were seeing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drilling_fluid#Composition_of_drilling_mud [wikipedia.org]
https://oilandgasoverview.com/what-is-drilling-mud-and-how-it-is-used/ [oilandgasoverview.com]
https://www.wyoben.com/ [wyoben.com]
Another common form is cat litter. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday September 16 2023, @02:31PM (5 children)
Very interesting and informative, as always. Do they always use drilling mud? I was there and didn't see anything that looked much like bentonite mud- just water and tailings coming up. But it might have been in solution in a tank on the rig and I simply wasn't aware of the bentonite being used. Perhaps it was only done very early in the drilling? Once you start hitting water there's no need to add water + bentonite?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 16 2023, @04:11PM (4 children)
Probably any or all of the above, depending what sort of ground you're drilling. On softer ground, may only need a little sealant. But I can't imagine drilling through hundreds of feet of desert caliche without copious lubrication.
Well, I take that back... I can not only imagine it, I've witnessed it. Where I lived in the desert, a big-ass aquifer was was at 270 feet, and my well was 405 feet deep. (I know this with great precision, because at one point I had to replace the well pump. But that well would do 70gpm all day long, which was probably the limit of the pump and pipe.) -- I had a neighbor who was on a private commercial water system, wearied of paying $100/mo. for a trickle, did not care to pay a driller (in 1999 my well cost $56,000, and wells are cash on the barrelhead) and decided he'd hand-dig his own well. So down he goes, a little at a time (with caliche, =very= little at a time) and when he gave up after ten years or so had a stable hole 125 feet deep.
That's where I came in, and told him why he never hit water....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday September 16 2023, @04:58PM (3 children)
You know some well stuff. I've done some work for a hydrogeologist, but not the drilling- mostly well and wetland monitoring / sampling.
My aforementioned well is also 400' deep, and drilled about the same time- late '90s. They hit "bedrock" and then water fairly shallow, but the driller felt the rate was a trickle, like 1-2 gpm or so, so he kept going. Somewhere I have the records. I'm not sure of the final total gpm. I do know the water sits somewhere around 33' below grade. However, scarily, many years ago the thing emptied itself out completely. I have a bit of a phobia (though somewhat legit) of unknown underground caverns collapsing and big sinkhole forming. When the well did that I surmised some major deep collapse happened. The water eventually returned. Maybe my pump is hanging in a huge underground room.
I have an older well, maybe 140' deep, that works, but runs dry quickly. Mostly due to clogging. I think it could be cleaned, and years ago I had planned several methods including surging it. Point is, it's there for backup, which is very nice, but I have to be very careful with total water consumption. I've tried leaving it on for days and it will eventually run dry, even with minimal conservational usage. Recovery rate very low, obviously. I've heard of other forms of "developing" / cleaning a well. I've considered trying it someday. I can pull up that pump- I've done it and a similar friend's pump. It's not fun though. But no possible way to pull up the 400' one! I'm on borrowed time with it.
Years ago I considered trying a "DeepRock" kit. DIY drill rig. Maybe you know of them?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 16 2023, @05:36PM (2 children)
Trust me, you most certainly can pull up a pump that is 400 feet down. I know this for a fact, because that's where my pump sat at my desert place, and it cost me $11,000 to pull and replace it (about a third of that was the new pump). It took two guys and a boom rig three days to do it, and it almost got stuck at the very top.
I don't know what's done nowadays to rejuvenate a well, but I can tell you how not to... don't drop a stick of dynamite down one that's gone slow. Current neighbor's dad tried that, and wrecked it entirely. After two failed holes (seems here bad water is only about 30 feet from good water, running over the same sheet of underlying rock) drilled by professionals, and many years of frustration, son finally gave up and hand-excavated the original 1930 well. Only about 20 feet deep, but good water once he got all the debris cleared out. No obvious reason why it had gone slow in the first place, nothing down there but head-sized rocks, likely just silted up.
Very common for the first water you hit to be either inadequate, or too contaminated (up the road a ways from me they never use first water, because it's full of natural arsenic) for household use, but to hit more and cleaner water farther down. Generally the well-drilling guys in your area will know all about it, and the best way to proceed... where to drill, where not, how to fix what you've got, where there's nothing but dry holes... seriously, they're the ones to consult. Vast wealth of location-specific knowledge. It's different everywhere, due to local conditions underground.
Don't know any DIY kits, but there are vids on YT of folks in India who have the whole low-tech well-drilling process down pat. Lots of hard labor involved even tho the process mostly relies on gravity, but it gets done pretty quick.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday September 16 2023, @06:48PM (1 child)
Sorry, you misunderstood me. When I said "I" can't pull up the 400' one, I literally mean "I", as in me, by myself. I can and have pulled up 130-150' ones. It's not fun, and you wish for some wedge blocks so you can rest a bit.
If there was a way to open the check valve at the bottom so as to drain the pipe during a pull, I could probably pull the 400' one. With wedge blocks.
A guy came out and did it by himself with a fairly simple 3-wheel rig. 3 wheelbarrow looking wheels in a triangle, all coming together tightly in the center, at least 1 driven by a motor, in some kind of strong frame. What to do with 400' of black poly pipe was more the issue. He didn't charge a ton either. No big rig or derrick or crane, but it was all black poly. Maybe yours is steel pipe? That would require a crane.
No, I would not drop a stick of dynamite in a well. It'll all just collapse. Something else percussive, maybe an m80 or something small, maybe, but even then it might not do much good. Yes, it's silted up from years of use and some abuse. That's normal- silt moves toward the hole and of course the total available area is smaller and smaller as you approach the cylinder. So naturally it clogs.
Hydrofracking ("fracking") is sometimes used for waterwell development. It hopes to force bigger gravel into the fissures and hold them open so the water (or gas or oil) can move toward the well.
We'll see. It'd be nice to have the old well more functional, for many reasons, including its water always tastes better than the 400' one.
Iron pyrite is also a problem for some groundwater.
You might find "DeepRock" interesting.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday September 16 2023, @07:52PM
Oh, poly pipe. That's cheating. Mine had 400 feet of 3 inch steel pipe. Never mind the water, the pipe was several hundred pounds per section (and I vaguely recall there were 28 sections). It was about all the truck they brought could lift. But just poly, yeah, I'd think that could be levered out by a clever one-man-band -- same principle, just smaller. Have heard of someone trying to pull poly with a truck; suppose it could be done if you had a wheel for it to roll over at the lip, and enough linear clearance.
LIS I don't know what they do to unclog 'em nowadays. I'd talk to an old-timey well guy, they have all kinds of tricks we'd never think of.
Yeah, iron clogs stuff up, and lemme tellya, arseloads of calcium salts in the water corrodes stuff good too, and for best results, combine the two (welcome to the desert, where no one who drinks tap water suffers from mineral deficiency). Worst thing the well can do in that case is sit idle. After I left the desert, my old place sat vacant for a couple years... I've heard from the new owners, and they already had to replace my new pump and new pipe after only about ten years, probably because it sat there concentrating corrosives while it wasn't in use, and that jumpstarted the corrosion that otherwise might have taken 25 or 30 years to eat through it.
Our water down there wasn't just "hard" .... you've heard the old biblical complaint about having to make bricks without straw? Pikers... we could make bricks without mud! (Just about literally. Every year I scooped an inch of salt out of my swamp cooler.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.