Tank Talk - Bulk Fuel Podcast

Frozen Foundations: Thermosyphons, Permafrost, and Arctic Fuel Storage featuring Ed Yarmak

• Integrity Environmental • Season 3 • Episode 8

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Permafrost is stable - until it isn’t. As Arctic industries continue to expand, the ground below our fuel tanks and pipelines is literally thawing, causing dangerous settlement and structural failure. 

In this episode, we’re joined by Ed Yarmak, President of Arctic Foundations Inc., a pioneer in the development and installation of thermosyphon technology - the passive heat transfer systems used across Alaska, Canada, and beyond to keep permafrost frozen and critical infrastructure standing. 

We explore: 

  • What permafrost really is - and why thawing causes tanks to tilt, settle, or even fail 
  • How thermosyphons work (10,000-ft overview - no engineering degree required) 
  • How project managers can know before construction whether permafrost will be a problem 
  • What happens when older tanks - built before thermosyphons - start to settle decades later 
  • How modern systems are retrofitted with directional drilling and insulation technologies 
  • Pipeline applications (Alyeska and beyond) 
  • Ed’s top resources for professionals navigating Arctic conditions 

If you work in fuel storage, remote operations, or Arctic infrastructure — this episode will change the way you think about what’s under your tanks. 

 UAF SNAP Climate tools

https://uaf-snap.org/climate-tools/https://snap.uaf.edu/tools/community-chartshttps://arcticeds.org/


Permafrost Conference Proceedings, Etc.

https://www.uspermafrost.org/publicationshttps://www.permafrost.org/publications/https://canadianpermafrostassociation.ca/glossary-of-permafrost-science-and-engineering.htm  https://canadianpermafrostassociation.ca/permafrost-dictionary.htm 

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Haley Hall:

Welcome to Tank Talk with Integrity Environmental. Join us as we sit down with founder, principal consultant, and bulk fuel storage expert Shannon Oelkers to explore regulations, safety, and essential tips for navigating the full fuel storage industry. Join us as we explore the unique joys of work and life in Alaska with industry experts, including our team, vendors we work with, and the companies we support.

Shannon Oelkers:

Welcome to Tank Talk Podcast. Hello listeners. As you know, we work in Alaska in addition to the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. Many regions in Alaska are subject to permafrost conditions in the soils. I wanted to briefly go over what permafrost was in case you're unfamiliar. Permafrost is permanently frozen soil layers that are stable when frozen, but as they melt, the soils are trapped within the frozen lands subside and cause a whole lot of settlement for anything built on top of them. Maintaining that frost layer becomes really important for long-term infrastructure, especially things like fuel storage tanks and pipelines, for example. For much of Alaska, the way to control permafrost subsidence is to maintain that permafrost layer with a technology called thermosiphons. Today, I am very fortunate to have Ed Yarmak from Arctic Foundations Inc. to explore one of the critical tools to maintaining permafrost that are utilized in industrial facilities across Alaska, Canada, Russia, China, and more. Arctic Foundations is an international leader in heat transfer and ground freezing systems. Welcome to the show, Ed. Could you please tell our listeners a little bit about your background and how you got involved in this unique industry?

Ed Yarmak:

Good morning, Shannon, and thank you for uh inviting me to the show. It was a long time ago, say maybe 44, 45 years ago, I was just happening to be having an evening talk with my an engineering mentor, Earth Long, who owned Earth Arctic Foundations at the time, and he said, How much do you want to come to work for in dollars? I was a demolition and did not ask for a raise from where I was working at the time. But I sort of jumped at the chance. And so really, I just kind of fell into this, and it's been kind of an exciting ride ever since. What kind of engineering background do you have at I have a civil engineering degree from the University of Alaska and a master of engineering degree in geotechnical engineering from the University of California? So I know dirt pretty well. Almost all of permafrost I learned on the job.

Shannon Oelkers:

When did you first see permafrost? Did you grow up in Alaska or did you come up here for school?

Ed Yarmak:

Oh, I was born here in Alaska a long time ago. You know, and I think the first time I saw permafrost was out hunting with my dad stuff, caribou hunting and probably in the area stuff. Later on, as I was going to school, we even found some permafrost in Anchorage. I was doing land surveying to pay my way through college, and we'd find frozen material in late August and probably. So it was interesting. Of course, you know, most of Anchorage has been developed in many of the areas that had the frozen soil have h been thawed out now. But there still is permafrost in Anchorage.

Shannon Oelkers:

I actually have heard that.

Ed Yarmak:

Yeah. You might recall there were some buildings built along uh the lower end of Firelake several years ago, and then they they settled and stuff. And that was there was permafrost underneath there. There was also the on-ramp to the Glen Highway right there. The state had stripped all the ground and put tar on the ground to make it black to get the summer's heat in and thaw off the permafrost there.

Shannon Oelkers:

Speed up the process. Yeah. Forgive me, but the underlying issue for Arctic facilities is that there are continuous and fractured lenses of permafrost or just permanently frozen ground. But I think nowadays it's probably more these fractured lenses, and they lie underneath many of these industrial buildings and infrastructure that you and I work with. And the heat generated by those structures causes that layer to thaw over time, like you just said. Could you give us just a brief overview of this Arctic condition and how your thermosiphon technology addresses that issue?

Ed Yarmak:

Okay. Well, we kind of have to go back to the beginning there. And to understand the issue, we need to know how this material was formed. Because a lot of people say permafrost. And permafrost is by the scientists, it's just soil or rock that's been frozen for over two years. And so then you say, okay, well, how is this soil formed? And how is the or the rock or whatever? And sometimes you get really lucky and you've got a big plane of gravel, and it could be frozen, and you can build on top of it, and it can thaw out, and nothing's gonna move. And you always get really lucky. But other times you're gonna have fine-grain materials that when it gets cold on top, the water segregates into ice lenses. Sometimes you've been far enough north where you've seen patterned ground, and that's where the gets so cold that the ground shrinks and it cracks, and then water goes into those cracks. And then you make these vertical ice lenses or ice wedges that go down into the soil, and they grow as the years go on. And then when you go to try to build something on top, it generally will have problems unless you're you know thermally treating that. I mean, there's our system and there's other systems to treat the permafrost, the thermaline, but generally our system tends to work because it doesn't require any. The thermosiphon devices that we build are all based on two-phase technology. So if you can imagine that you have a tube in the ground that comes up out of the ground, and in that tube is a refrigerant. We use carbon dioxide generally for our refrigerant, and so there's some liquid refrigerant in the bottom of that tube, and the rest of it is filled with vapor, kind of like a half-empty tank or something like that, or even lower. So it's just, and there's nothing else in there. And so whenever it gets cold on top, that vapor condenses, and that's releasing heat to the air through the pipe wall, and the condensate wants to roll down, wants to go down to the bottom by gravity. Of course, when it condenses, it slightly lowers the pressure on the inside of the vessel, and the liquid on the bottom boils, and that absorbs heat from the ground, and the condensate rolls down the wall, and anytime it hits something that's warmer than it is, it re-evaporates. And this cycle just goes on as long as the air is cold or colder than the ground. The uh air is not colder than the ground, nothing happens. It doesn't work in reverse. So they're a very simple machine with no moving parts, basically. They require minimal maintenance other than just to make sure things are working.

Shannon Oelkers:

You know, Ed, I have seen hundreds of those thermosiphones. I've helped install them on projects, and I always thought they were full of fluid. I had no idea that they had vapor in them, and that was the driving heat sink.

Ed Yarmak:

There are fluid systems that are out there, Shannon. And the issue with a fluid system is it has it's all fluid, and so it has a lot of internal resistance to have to overcome to get that fluid to turn over and move. I mean, you could a big fluid system, you could just say it might be a fuel tank that's out there that's sitting on the ground, you fill it full of fuel, and then it gets cold outside, the fuel around the outside of that tank will fall to the bottom, and the other stuff will rise in the middle. That's sort of how the liquid thermosiphons work. There's a whole lot of them in Russia, and they're usually over there, they're usually uh they use kerosene as the inside. Oh so it doesn't freeze and it'll work and stuff like that. But they don't work that good. Say, let's let's just say that you know the amount of heat transfer that you can get out of a two-phase unit is easily ten times, which you can get out of a single phase unit.

Shannon Oelkers:

And it's two-phase being your the gas to liquid model versus a solely liquid. Exactly. When and if your uh thermosyphins get damaged, all they do is leak CO2 as well. I would imagine that's a benefit also. Yeah.

Ed Yarmak:

When somebody runs into one with a truck or a loader or something like that, it's pretty benign, unless it's inside where you know then it's also fixing agent hazardous. But you know, outside, it's all pretty benign. If they can patch the hole or at least get it covered up and stuff, everything can be repaired.

Shannon Oelkers:

Well, thank you. That is a good 10,000-foot overview of how we're keeping things cold below the ground. For all our project managers out there, how do we know that permafrost is going to be an issue at a project site?

Ed Yarmak:

Your best friend probably is your geotechnical engineer that's on the project. And the civil engineer and the geotechnical engineer should have gone through and done investigation and stuff like that to, you know, for if you're looking at a new tank and stuff, if you've got old tanks and stuff that were put out there, sometimes you just don't know exactly what was there. When we were working with an old tank in Greenland at Saundestrom Fjord Airbase, you know, it was built in the middle 50s, and the ground was probably 25 degrees Fahrenheit at that time. It was a fuel tank. When we got to it, it was being used for uh for jet fuel. But so if you go from the middle 50s, they didn't really have problems with this thing on permafrost with no other abatement measures for heat until into the 2010s. But in 2015, they determined there was an issue and that they had to take the tank out of service. And instead of putting some sort of device underneath of it or changing the design to keep things cool, they just rebuilt the tank. They put in, they leveled everything out, they put in a brand new beautiful bottom and a whole ring of the bottom row of plates on the tank and put it back in service. And so by the time 2019 rolled around, there were more issues with it. And, you know, things were moving, and the tank inspectors were saying, hey, we we can keep this for now, but we need to really be watching it because there's some serious issues with the tank. The owner of the tank, which started with the U.S. Air Force and then it went off to be an aviation fuel supplier. They just couldn't find it in their budget to fix this tank. And so the good thing that happened is they now have a runway that can get really big jet planes into Greenland at Nook instead of at the old Air Force base there. And so they don't need the tank anymore. So it's just gonna sit there and rock.

Shannon Oelkers:

Rest in peace, little tank in Greenland. You could have been saved.

Ed Yarmak:

Actually, a pretty big tank, but you know.

Shannon Oelkers:

RIP big tank. So permafrost is something you can't necessarily see with your eyeballs. You're gonna have to have geotechnical reports to know. And for our listeners that have facilities with older tanks, especially in the Arctic zone, it may be there underneath your tank right now and it may become a problem in the future. For most of our listeners, though, if you own a tank, you're gonna know about a problem with permafrost when you get an API 653 report that shows tank settlement. That's typically where it comes in. That's where you know get the diagnosis. Now, I do want to do public service announcement. Not all tank settlement is due to permafrost. Tanks can settle for other reasons, including foundation degradation and all sorts of stuff like that. But generally, if you've got significant tank subsidence or settlement, there's a problem with the foundation, and that may be related to permafrost. So let's talk about permafrost and tank settlement specifically, because you and I have worked together on at least one project with permafrost settlement. What happens to a tank when the ground underneath it starts to settle, Ed?

Ed Yarmak:

Well, a tank deforms. And tanks are, you know, they look like really stout structures, but with the amount of fuel and weight and everything else in them, they're actually a little delicate. If you see, I mean, look, I think the worst tank disaster that I've heard of or and seen photos of was the Narils diesel tank in Russia that went down a few years ago. And some people blamed it on climate change and permafrost thaw. Turns out that actually the tank wasn't built the way it was supposed to be built. The ring wall of the tank was supposed to have been supported on piling that went all the way to bedrock, and they didn't quite get there. And so they were supported in the permafrost, and then as the permafrost warmed up, then they settled enough. And if you look at the photos of that tank after it failed, I mean it ruptured, and then as the fuel went out, it just sucked the rest of the steel down toward it. It turned it into a big twisted mass. That's about the worst thing I think that can happen to your tank. So I think it's a really good idea that people keep checking about their tanks all the time.

Shannon Oelkers:

Agreed, agreed. And we'll try to include photos of that tank for in our show notes so people can see the it was the Norelskope in Russia.

Ed Yarmak:

Norelsk. I'm gonna look at this idea. I can see the perfect.

Shannon Oelkers:

All right, so I'm imagining that tank is pretty large. So for larger tanks, we're gonna see settlement that includes things like draping or lower on one side, higher on the other. And like you said, that's very hard for a tank to handle because a lot of the physics of a tank for holding the weight of the fuel relies on the shell to be round in shape. And when that roundness, when the tank becomes out of round, it's weaker. Just like it's easier to crush a soda pop can from the side than it is from the top and the bottom. Once the foundation starts sinking on a tank, it's uh much more susceptible to damage. And then one thing I want to make clear for permafrost, it's not just sinking, right? You can get jacking as well.

Ed Yarmak:

Well, you know, maybe around the edge of a tank if you've got frost susceptible soils. And so you've got you have you'd basically it'd be the same frost heave that you'd get if the tank wasn't there, but it would be close to the edge, so you'd have something that would be pushing up around the edge. Kind of like people may have a garage that's that they have that's unheated. They they find that their floor moves around in the garage with the seasons and stuff. So that's a seasonal thing. I see. And you can kind of fix that, at least some of it, by using some insulation on the outside of the tank and just protecting the ground from the frost there. Now, if you've got good granular material that's non-frost susceptible, in other words, it's not going to segregate and make ice lenses and stuff like that, then you're probably fine. But if you've got silty materials and stuff, you are going to get frost segregation in there and you're going to get ice and stuff as the ground freezes. And then, of course, ice expands 9%, not just a couple. Nine is a lot of percent when you think about it. So things move around quite a bit.

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Shannon Oelkers:

Well, and now that you've said that, I'm thinking about pipelines that I've seen and how much they move in a season as well. And so cross-jacking probably impacts your pipelines more than your tank. I also just want to briefly mention for those of us with tanks that are smaller, a smaller diameter tank may not drape or settle, but it may start tilting just because the physics are tighter. So excessive tilt can also be an indication of permafrost impacts if you're reading that API 653 report. I also want to I just want to make a shout out for those of you that receive API 653 reports. There's almost always a settlement report included with an internal API 653 for an API 653 external, it's not always included. And if you are in a permafrost susceptible zone, you should probably ask for it to be done. I know it's not always easy to do because you may have a liner that covers the chine of your tank, and you've got to remove that liner to be able to do that settlement survey. But sometimes internal surveys are 20 years apart. And I don't know that if you live, if you your tank lives in a place that is susceptible to permafrost, you want to wait 20 years to find out how much it's tilting. You might want that every five years from the external. So just a public service announcement for those of you that are subject to API 653. So, Ed, everything we just talked about is a pretty serious impact and very expensive to correct. And sometimes that's an if it can be corrected at all. What can companies do when designing constructing new tanks to prevent or avoid foundation settlement if they know or suspect that permafrost is going to be an issue there?

Ed Yarmak:

I've got some new tank stuff here on my desk. Call Ed. Call Ed, that's the first step. I mean, you're basically, you know, if you're putting that the kind of money that you have to put into a POL project now, you're gonna have a chief technical engineer, they're going to look at it, they're going to say, hey, there's potentially a problem. And a lot of times the way to solve that problem is to use thermosipons underneath the tank. Big tanks, we use these things called flat lip thermosipons, and you can lay them on the ground, that's just cat tracked. We like them to be flat, we tell the uh contractors that they have to be within an inch vertical as they're put in. They'll actually work with more undulation than that, but that's where we want to get it uh thing started. And then the idea is just to pull enough heat out from underneath the tank, and then there's gonna have to be probably be some insul an insulation layer in there too. But we we're just trying to make the permafrost that's below us think that it's just normal winter up on top. And sometimes we supercool it to be a little bit colder because sometimes in a place where we're at, those soils aren't all that scout just dark within there a little bit better when they're frozen, frozen harder. So do that. Smaller tanks can be if you're using thermosiphons, they can be put in with sloping thermosyphons that go in from the side. Some of those we can manufacture them here in Anchorage or ship them out as straight units, they're all charged, they can be bent in the field and installed. But when you do that, then you've got these condensers sticking up that the tank corrector has to work around and stuff. So there's trade-offs there. That is usually the lowest cost if it's a small tank and stuff like that. Otherwise, the flat loops tend to be uh lower cost. If you have a old tank, suspect that it's settling and you can't move it or anything like that, then the drilling people come out and make money to put thermosipons or something else underneath the tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

Usually, yes. So so usually tanks that are older and larger diameter, you can't just lift the tank up, move it somewhere, lay your flat siphons underneath it, and then put the tank back. I mean, you can, but there's a lot of logistics in the way. So could you talk a little bit about so you and I did a project recently where they did horizontal drilling essentially to lay the flat loops in underneath tanks that had already been constructed. How did that work?

Ed Yarmak:

Well, it seemed to work pretty well. Although they weren't flat loops, they were long sloping it back for their but they were they were long, they're very long. The horizontal drilling contractor used a technique that's pretty common for a lot of utility work and stuff, where they use a drilling mud to hold the hole open. They drill the hole and then they push the thermosiph into the hole, and that would the drilling mud would come back out back to the hole opening there. Then they could clean that stuff up. And then the thermosipon was installed. You just have to make sure it was turned in the right direction and stuff. Those almost always go out in pieces, and we have to put stuff together to field. I believe those units were 80 or 90 feet long that went underneath the tanks. They were made in a long L. And the L was a component that can be used for active refrigeration should things get warm or yet, and we can't just rely on natural refrigeration that they can be plugged into the active system.

Shannon Oelkers:

Can you talk more about that active system, Ed? Because the passive system is what we talked about earlier, but these thermosyphons in particular, they kind of have like a backup feature in case the ambient air temperature is not enough, right? How does the secondary component work there?

Ed Yarmak:

You know, it's just again, it's it's really simple because you know, simple is the thing that always works. It's just a coil on the inside of the unit you can expand refrigerant into, and so you're just making winter on the inside of the refrigerator, or on the inside of the thermosyphon instead of otherwise. And you don't have to discharge the thermosphone or do anything else with it, you just have to turn the turn the system on when you when you do it. And so you can get all of your passive refrigeration in the winter time, and at that particular project you're talking about, they usually turn that stuff on in maybe June or something like that, and they'll be turning it off about the end of October, you know, so in a couple of weeks. So and that's and I don't know that they on those particular units that they really need to run them that long, but they're their the refrigeration system is pretty small because they do have a good insulation blanket, and so they're just willing to pay just a little bit extra for power for security in their case.

Shannon Oelkers:

Well, and security into the next 50 years, because from my understanding of the economics, is permafrost is going to warm and that lens is going to once once the lens begins to melt, it's going to continue to melt. And so the slowing of that melting is critical. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember from a lot of our discussions, at some point there's an inversion, right, where it melts and then you can slow it down, but at some point it becomes faster at melting. Am I remembering that correctly?

Ed Yarmak:

No, really, what we have is when the permafrost thaws, there's an annual thaw that we get. And the only reason permafrost is there is because we have winters that are very cold. And we freeze everything up that thaws and make it colder. And that's why the farther north you go, the deeper the permafrost is and stuff. So when you come back to these areas that we're looking at, things are gonna thaw. If they have a passive system working on them, at some time, if the world keeps warming up, as some people say it is, we're not gonna have enough cold to keep it cold on there. And so they are gonna have to turn those active refrigeration on, you know, just to keep the permafrost there. And when you look at things way out in the future there, you know, 50, 60 years, it's really hard to say exactly what's going to happen. We try to do our best, we try to be very conservative about it, but it at some time, these passive units, they're just not gonna have enough capacity on them. We've already gone in some areas and made the passive units larger. And that's you know, that'll carry them on for another 20 or 30 years or so. But at some time, it's just not gonna work, and there's gonna be a decision from the owner on what are they gonna do with this facility? Are they going to try to keep an ice cube in the desert or are they just gonna build a new facility or move their facility or something like that? You know, it's it's kind of it's hard to look that far out and be accurate.

Shannon Oelkers:

You don't have a crystal ball, Ed.

Ed Yarmak:

I use I use the UAF SNAP community charts or climate change stuff to try to look at that sort of thing. But again, it's just a best guess type thing. And so we don't know what's what and when things are gonna happen out there. Recently there was some work done in Diopic, not for tanks, but for permaf basically for permafrost thaw. The scientists went to the community folks, at least the commute some of the community leaders, and they say, well, you're gonna have some problems out here at the turn of the next century. And the community leaders are saying, our people are very adaptable. We don't really want to be looking at what's happening in the next 80 years. We need to know what's going on in 20 years. We can plant for 20 years and stuff. So that's what a lot of people are doing.

Shannon Oelkers:

Okay. Yep. Although I live in tank land where an asset's supposed to last 100 years, theoretically. We do have some assets that have lasted a hundred years. We've got a few tanks that are from the 19 teens and 20s. They typically are not in northern climates though.

Ed Yarmak:

There's tanks at Thule Air Base in Greenland that when I visited in the late 80s had been they were empty because they weren't doing B-52 flights out of Thule all the time and they had a bunch of empty tanks. But all of their tanks had huge winds on the upwind side. And so they had to had to repair all those things if they were going to use them. And I, you know, looking at Google Earth, that you know, I'd seen that a lot of those have been removed and stuff. And maybe they repaired other ones, but there's you know other things that happen in the Arctic and again like the wind or if the tanks would have been full, they probably would have been fine.

Shannon Oelkers:

Hundred percent, yep. No, there's stiffener rings that can help with that wind damage, but you have to calculate it and it's got to be engineered and you have to know the climate and the location. And they were older tanks, they just didn't calculate that stuff in the 1950s, and honestly, they may not have known. They probably showed up in Greenland and built a tank that day.

Ed Yarmak:

That's probably what they did. And the year before that we had been there was when the the dents came. We were told that they thought they were going to eclipse the Mount Washington speed record for airspeed uh on land, but the anemometer uh shack uh blew out.

Shannon Oelkers:

We work in ADAC a lot, and that happens almost every time they have a big storm. It like reaches the new record and then the wind thing blows off the building, and then they think they don't know how high it goes. I do want to talk briefly about, you know, we're talking about permafrost, and I feel like we should also talk about pipelines. I briefly mentioned it with the jacking, but permafrost affects pipelines as well. And if you've got tanks, you've got pipelines. Have thermosiphons been used to address that for above and below grade piping?

Ed Yarmak:

Well, the largest example for above-grade piping is the Trans-Alaska pipeline. They've got 120,000 thermosiphons that they bought from Grand X McDonnell Douglas on that line. They did a real good job of you know doing their design and redundancy factor. And look, that pipeline's almost 50 years old and stuff there.

Shannon Oelkers:

And it's running warm crude through it, right? Yeah.

Ed Yarmak:

And some people they used to say that, oh, they needed that stuff because of the warm crude. Well, the warm crude took care of itself because it was, you know, 10 feet off the ground. But in the ground, it was when it was put in the ground, it was put in in falstable material. Or there's some areas where the where that pipeline was dug down to foster materials beneath easily uh you know 25 feet iC silk.

Shannon Oelkers:

Oh so they leveraged geotechnical reports to put it in where it made the most sense. Yeah, it's the geotechs and stuff.

Ed Yarmak:

Yeah. You know, in these small areas, the small tank areas and stuff, you know, a lot of times if the instead of just making a thermosiphon system for a tank, they'll make the thermosiphon system for the whole tank and impoundment area. And so all of your piping will sit on top of that in the impoundment area. And so that's gonna be relatively stable in there. You still have to get out of there somewhere, so there's gonna be things moving around, and you want to make sure that whatever you're you're building is gonna be able to move or flex or whatever in there. You know, we don't want it to look like the tank farm in Selwick did in like 1982 with all of these little vertical tanks tilted all over with wood blocks underneath of them trying to get them to be stable and root hoses in various conditions and stuff. It was a pretty ugly, uh, ugly, ugly tank barn at that time.

Shannon Oelkers:

I would like to say that that image that you just painted is something that existed in the 1980s and is no longer, but I cannot say that. I have definitely seen some tanks that are in similar straits right now. And I think the takeaway is that anytime you have pipeline points that need to be stable, like for example, where it connects to the tank or it goes up and over a containment wall of some kind, you need to stabilize that whole section because if the pipe is moving and the wall is moving and the tank is moving, it's not going to end well for any of those three parts. And there's gonna be a lot of stress and tension on your system. The rest of a pipeline is pretty mobile, and that's why pipeline supports exist. And pipelines are made of ductile steel because they're very flexible. And you can adjust the pipeline as it runs over ground, but once it gets to where it's connecting to the tank or within the tankyard, your flexibility goes down and it becomes more important to stabilize things. Thank you for giving us that thorough overview of this very Arctic-specific issue. I was wondering if you had any resources for our listeners that they want to learn more about this, especially if they're responsible for tanks in a permafrost area.

Ed Yarmak:

Oh, resources.

Shannon Oelkers:

You mentioned a SNAP website earlier.

Ed Yarmak:

Yeah, that's the UAF SNAP uh website. It's a scenario, it's something that they do for climate scenarios and stuff. It's a great place to see where they think your climate is going. And it's good for Alaska, Yukon, and Northwest Territories. So unfortunately, it's you can't get there's no information for other places, and it's hard to get other Arctic information from other places too. Looking at if you were interested in permafrost and what your papers on and looking for papers and stuff, a couple of very good places to look at are at the United States Permafrost Association's website, and that's USpermafrost.org. They have resources, publications and stuff, some old uh permafrost conferences and things. And you can also go to plain permafrost.org, which is the International Permafrost Association's site. Oh all the old conferences, the uh proceedings are there and stuff, and you can you can see how people built stuff a long time ago and now stuff. It's pretty interesting.

Shannon Oelkers:

Yeah, I was really fascinated when you and I worked together, and which is why you're here. I wanted to learn more about it and dig deeper into it. But yeah, I think there's plenty of case studies about tanks out there on some of those websites, so I'll see if I can dig one up and attach it as a reference.

Ed Yarmak:

Yeah, the absolute the Narilsk site in Russia, it was one of the worst disasters that came from from a tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

How big was that tank?

Ed Yarmak:

Several million gallons. It was not anything like we have out in the normal villages. Maybe it would be the size of one of the tanks in red dogs. Oh, okay. Those are big tanks up there.

Shannon Oelkers:

All right. Well, Ed, thank you so much for your time today. If people want to reach out to you, how best could they get a hold of you?

Ed Yarmak:

Well, the best thing to do is just to go to our company website, ArcticFoundations.com, and hit the info button. That's the easiest way. And then it'll come in and somebody will look at it and they'll say, oh, Ed needs to see this. Or if they have needs that somebody else can handle here, we'll be able to take care of.

Shannon Oelkers:

Awesome. Ed, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

Ed Yarmak:

Thank you, Shannon. Have a great day.

Shannon Oelkers:

Yep, you too. Hi there. This is Shannon Olker. And as the owner of Integrity Environmental, I wanted to take a minute here at the end of the podcast to make sure that you knew the following. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal or regulatory advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional regulatory or legal advice. And the views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host, that would be me, or integrity environmental. Thank you very much for listening. And if you do need professional regulatory advice, we'd be happy to help you as part of our consulting services.

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Shannon Oelkers

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