Here we will cover topics from best practices, to current events, to interviewing Experts in these fields, to stories of recent projects that all related to remediation. We will also address specific topics and Listener questions. And we will host Guest Industry Professionals and have live shows from conferences.
LTR - Ep 61 - RESULTS FROM - Large Scale Demonstration of "The New Remediation Paradigm" in Odessa, Texas on 7/15/2026
•Charles D. Fator
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
28:54
In this 61st episode, I discuss RESULTS FROM - Large Scale Demonstration of "The New Remediation Paradigm" in Odessa, Texas on 7/15/2026.
Lighthouse Environmental hosted Hanby Environmental and OMG Solutions to perform a large scale remediation demonstration. The remediation area was contaminated by a combination of Crude Oil and Production Water (aka Produced Water, Brine Water, Salt Water).
Hanby's field Test Kits provided the real time monitoring of the real time and in-situ (in place) remediation by OMG's ELMN8. ELMN8 is a non-hazardous and non-toxic ready to use solution that remediates upon contact.
During the demonstration, we had a scaled down version of a large scale soil remediation project, contaminated by both Hydrocarbons and Chlorides. This was performed on the floor of a trailer, to show that the contaminates were actually remediated and not pushed down below the surface.
OMG’s product ELMN8 was used to remediate both contaminates at the same time, upon contact. Hanby’s Field Test Kits for Hydrocarbons and Chlorides were both used to validate the remediation took place.
For Hydrocarbons, the threshold of interest is 1% or 10k ppm. The (3) samples had PreTreatment Hydrocarbon contamination levels range from 16-20k ppm and Post Treatment results of 900-1.1k ppm.
For Chlorides, the threshold of interest is 3k ppm. The (3) samples had PreTreatment Chlorides contamination levels range from 7.5-32.5k ppm and Post Treatment results of 1.8k ppm.
In both cases, All PreTreatment samples were significantly above the thresholds requiring remediation and Post Treatment, they were All significantly below the thresholds required for remediation.
Here are links to FaceBook and Linkedin Posts of The Results with pictures from the event:
Connect and Follow Us on both Facebook and Linkedin.
Join "The New Remediation Paradigm" and "The Paradigm Shift!"
"Thank You" Lighthouse Environmental for hosting our demonstration, Talon LPE for your interest and The Maloney's for making the long distance travel to see the remediation demonstration in person.
"Thank You" for tuning in and to Our Ongoing Sponsor Hanby Environmental for the continued support of our podcast having a positive impact on The Environmental Remediation Industry!
Send in any future podcast topics or questions to CFator@LetsTalkRemediation.com and follow us on FaceBook, Linkedin and X.
If you are not following this podcast and are in the Remediation Space, "You SHOULD Be!"
Also, if you are in The Remediation Industry and are interested in telling your story, we are looking for Experts to interview for future podcast episodes.
SPEAKER_00
And we're going to show you how to get started.
SPEAKER_01
Hey there, let's talk remediation. This is our 61st episode. Our 61st episode is brought to us by our ongoing sponsor, Hambi Environmental. Hambi Environmental is a manufacturer of field test kits to give immediate, accurate, and economical results for the detection of petroleum hydrocarbons, uh, PFAS and PFOS, and chlorides in soil, solid surface, and water analysis. So thank you, Hambi Environmental, for your ongoing support of this podcast, Let's Talk Remediation, where we're trying to have a positive impact on the environmental remediation industry. And with that, let's get started with episode number 61. Uh, episode 61 is going to build upon episode 58. In episode 58, we talked about a future event, uh, which was the large-scale demonstration of the new remediation paradigm in Odessa, Texas. And so in our 61st episode, we want to give the results or talk about what took place at that uh future event, the large-scale demonstration of the new remediation paradigm. So, our 61st episode will be uh the results from the large-scale demonstration of the new remediation paradigm in Odessa, Texas. And with that, let's dive right in. So it was last week on Wednesday, July the 15th, 2026, Handby Environmental and OMG Solutions were back in the Mecca, the oil and gas mecca, also known as Midland Odessa in West Texas, uh, where most of uh the oil and gas is produced. And so um one of our clients there, Lighthouse Environmental, was hosting uh Hambi Environmental and OMG Solutions to come in and give a large-scale demonstration. And so we invited those that uh could uh attend and see it live for themselves in person, a large-scale demonstration of the new remediation paradigm where we uh were going to have contamination from crude oil and chlorides, and in real time we were going to remediate those with OMG's solution eliminate, and we were going to monitor that remediation with Hambi environmentals field test kits. And so we did that, and um rather than go out into a field and have to get a bunch of approvals and go through safety meetings and create contamination on somebody else's property, uh, we took a different approach. What we did was typically when we give our demonstrations, we do them tabletop and we do it in a bowl so that you know we can kind of do away with anybody says, well, how do we know that you didn't just push it further down to the soil? So that's what we love about our tabletop demonstration. What we did was uh Randy Cook of OMG Solutions had this bright idea, well, let's just create a bigger bowl rather than contaminate other people's property. Uh let's create a bigger bowl that becomes large scale and that also has uh the bottom to where we can uh kill the the question as to whether stuff gets sunk further down into the soil. So what what he did was he obtained uh a large trailer, a dump trailer actually, and we created the the tabletop demonstration in the back of a trailer so it becomes large scale, so we can talk about it like it's large scale without having to contaminate other properties. So we took a yard of dirt and put it in the back of a trailer, and in the trailer, then went ahead and contaminated it with a combination of crude oil and uh production water that was high in chlorides, and uh we had that sitting there, and what we did was we tested it before in front of everybody. We tested it before, and we talked about how in a normal circumstance you would, you know, uh typically do four corners in the middle, and depending on how fur far out your contamination is spread or the area that you need to remediate, you would obviously do that in replicates of uh you know, making a grid, you know, and the further out it is, the more data points you're gonna want in between. So in this case, we talked about that and said with this yard of soil that was uh spread out, we said, well, typically you would want as a minimum to do the four corners in the middle. And then as the space got larger, you would replicate that by doing it in sections of four corners in the middle, and that way you can dial into if any particular areas were hotter than other areas or higher in contamination, you would want to focus your remediation efforts more there than in other spaces. But so we talked about that and showed what it would look like in that smaller space and said, for simplistic purposes here, now that we understand that's what you would do, you would you know test in those locations, then you would treat uh to remediate in those uh over the entire area, and then you would go back to those same locations and you would take uh the same samples again. So you have a pre-treatment and a post-treatment, uh post-remediation, so you would know where you're at and determine if you had met the desired threshold for all those locations, or if out of those, in this case, I'm talking about say four corners in the middle being five spaces, five testing sites. Maybe only one of those five needed some additional attention or something like that. So we talked our way through that so everybody had the understanding for you know the proper way to delineate, and that's not just at the surface, by the way. That yeah, you know, the longer the contamination has sat there, you would want to go uh beneath the surface as well and take uh samples at different depths. So you're delineating in 3D, not just 2D, not just horizontal, but including vertical as well. But in this case, um, you know, we we had uh the the depth was only you know about 10 inches, and we were going to use an 8-inch tiller anyway. So anyway, so having discussed that and shown how out in the field you would, you know, whether you're using a hand tiller like we were doing in the back of this uh in the back of this trailer or you were using an excavator because your your you know uh remediation site was larger in scale, uh, then you know, you would do that. But in this case, after discussion, we said, okay, we're gonna carve this area up into three spaces. We're gonna call this one, two, and three. And uh from there, we are going to take a sample where we took a sample basically creating the same thing from the the four corners in the middle, we took samples from multiple places within each of those three sections and created one sample, and that was the way we did it both pre-treatment and post-treatment. Um so basically using a grab sample for the area that was in that particular space. Now, if one of those three spaces was hotter than the rest, then obviously, you know, you'd want to maybe do more data points in that particular one area, you know, to really dial into where that hot spot contamination was, you know, because it may be a lower point in the elevation, which is where everything was running off to and accumulating at. Um so, but in this case, we just carved up the section once we once we had talked about how to properly delineate. We said, okay, let's just carve this up and be simple about it and just call each of these this this area three sections, section one, section two, section three. And in each of those three sections, we kind of got a little bit of a sample here, a little bit of a sample there, and jarred it up and shook it up in the jar so that it makes it a homogeneous, so we got a good mixture there. And we, because of the size of the area, said, okay, sample one is a good representation of this area, sample two is a good representation of this area, and sample three is a good representation of this area. Because we're we're we're really talking about uh you know the the plot being like a a three foot by three foot or four foot by four foot square. So, you know, we we we knew we didn't need to do you know four corners in the middle for each of those three sections. It really just didn't make sense because of the size. Um, but you visually you got the idea of what it would be if it was a a larger scale out in the field, but as opposed to in the back of this trailer. So first thing we did is we said, okay, let's find out where we are, what's pre-treatment in each of these three locations. And so we used our uh Hambi environmental TPH field test kit to test for the petroleum hydrocarbons to find out what the hydrocarbon levels were. And the results that we had was pre-treatment in uh section one had 19,674. So round it up, just call it 20,000 ppm. Okay. Section two wasn't as hot for uh petroleum hydrocarbons as it had 16,008 ppm. So 16,000 in section two for uh TPH or petroleum hydrocarbons, and then in section three we had 18,696. So uh round that up and call it 19,000. So uh in summary, again, section one had 20,000, section two had sixteen thousand, and section three had nineteen thousand. So that was for uh the hydrocarbons, petroleum hydrocarbons. Then we said, okay, well, let's Hambi environmental's uh chloride field test kit and test for chlorides in each of these sections. And what we did was in section one, we had 7,500 uh chlorides, 7,500 ppm chlorides in the soil. And then in section two, we had 32 and a half thousand ppm. So in section two had higher chlorides than anything else. And in section three had the same as section one, had 7,500 ppm chlorides. And so interesting enough, um, across the board in all three sections, you know, we had pretty close uh the amount of of hydrocarbons in each section. Again, section one had 20,000, section two had sixteen thousand, and section three had nineteen thousand. But on the chloride side, it seemed that most of the chlorides uh were the highest concentration was in section two. Because in section one and section three, we had the same amount. We had 7,500, but in section two, we had 32,500. So section two was higher in chlorides. So now we know where we're starting from, right? Because for petroleum hydrocarbons, the threshold of interest in the oil and gas industry is uh 1% or 10,000 parts per million. So in in each of these cases, being at section one, twenty thousand, section two, sixteen thousand, and section three being nineteen thousand, we are significantly above the threshold of interest of one percent or ten thousand parts per million. So we need to remediate the entire area for uh TPH. And they're all pretty close, you know, between sixteen thousand uh and twenty thousand, with again twenty thousand in section one, sixteen thousand in section two, and nineteen thousand in section three. So section one and section three are about the same, about twenty thousand, and uh then uh a little bit less uh petroleum hydrocarbons in section two at sixteen thousand, but all of them being significantly above the one percent or ten thousand parts per million means we need to remediate the entire area for petroleum hydrocarbons. And they're about the same, so uh we can remediate them about the same uh amount of treatment there. But on the chloride side, section one and section two uh had 7500 uh 7,500 ppm uh chlorides, which again uh is uh above the threshold because the threshold of interest for chlorides now is 3,000 ppm. So section one and section three being the same at 7,500 ppm is above the 3,000 ppm threshold, so obviously they need to be remediated, but section two has more chlorides than anything else because it has 32,500 ppm chlorides in in the soil there. So all of them are above the 3,000, um, sections one and section two being the same at 7,500, and in section uh I mean section one and section three being at 7,500, section two being significantly higher at 32,500 ppm. So all need to be remediated for chlorides. And um my my thinking there is is it's probably that because the the uh the chlorides were so accumulated there in the middle was initially uh when the soil had was dumped on the trailer, maybe the chlorides and then got spread the soil got spread out, but most of the chloride is kind of stuck there in the middle because 32,500 compared to 7,500 on both of the sides is a significant difference. So anyway, nevertheless, we have a threshold of interest of 1% or 10,000 ppm for hydrocarbons, and sections one at 20,000, section two at 16,000, section three at 19,000 are all significantly above, so remediation is required. Likewise on the chloride space, the the threshold of interest is three thousand ppm, and in uh section one we have seventy five hundred, section two we have uh uh uh thirty-two and a half thousand ppm, and section three we're uh we have seventy five hundred again. So all of them need to be remediated because we need to be below three thousand ppm. So what we did is we got to work, and uh so what we did was and and I'm gonna uh in the uh text content for this episode, I'm going to provide links to both my LinkedIn posts and my uh Facebook posts that have pictures uh of this taking place so you can see them. Um but so in the back of the the truck, what we had was we had the the dirt spread out with the contamination in it, and uh we had um a a tiller that would till down, we had the settings set to eight inches so that we could till down, but we wouldn't till into the bottom of the tr of the trailer. But so there's pictures there. You see Randy of OMG Solutions actually uh he's sprayed on first of all that the dirt had was a little bit dry and clump uh clumped and hardened a little bit. So we we added some water first to make it permeable and to actually break it up, so that we added a little bit of water and tilled it first, so that it fluffed up the soil to make it permeable, being ready to be treated or whatever. So we tilled it first, um, just to kind of break it up and make it fluffed up and permeable to the solution. So we add a little bit of water and we tilde it to fluff it up. Then we sprayed it with the eliminate because the eliminate solution is non-hazardous and non-toxic, it has to contact the contamination in order to break it down. It's breaking it down on a molecular level. So, you know, it has to create the contact. So tilling the the after treating it with the eliminate, tilling it creates the contact. While at the same time, what it's doing is when you create that contact by uh treating it by spraying it on, you're doing at the surface. So when you till it, you're creating contact, but you're also bringing up soil from underneath that hasn't been contacted yet to the surface. So you're mixing it up, you're tilling it up, you're creating the contact of the eliminate solution with the contaminants in the soil, and you're bringing the soil that hasn't been treated up from beneath the surface to the surface so that it is available to now make the treatment on that section. So after having treated and tilled, now you you treat again and you till again. So it's a two-step process there because you have to uh create the contact with the tiller, and then in addition to that, you need to bring this stuff that hasn't been treated from underneath the surface uh to the surface. Now, this is uh you know the way it's best, right? Because it's the most efficient and fast method because you're creating the contact with the tiller. Uh sometimes there's infrastructure in the ground and you can't till, in which case you can uh either inject and let it migrate, or you can uh dump it on top and let it migrate down with gravity working for you. But in both those cases, it's just gonna be a longer process because it takes the migration. Now, the solution is gonna migrate and follow the same path that the contamination has used to spread and it's gonna clean it up along the way. It's just that process is gonna take longer. That's why creating the contact with the tiller is the is the most efficient means to do it. And so, as you'll see in the pictures, you'll see Randy of OMG Solutions tilling the solution in. You'll see me using the TPH test kit to test for TPH, and then you'll see me using the chloride uh test kit to test for the chloride levels. And again, you know, you'll see that the the spraying uh on of the treatment of the eliminate product, uh and you'll see a sampling to run those analyses uh in the pictures. There are pictures that are worth a thousand words, and you'll be able to see the results that took place as well. Um, so those are the results from the large-scale demonstration that we did uh in Odessa, Texas last week at Lighthouse Environmental. And I mean it everybody saw it happen live right in front of them. We had a live dialogue back and forth uh while doing it, and it was it was a great demonstration. There was a lot of great knowledge transfer there and understanding, and uh everybody was super impressed because you know they got to see it in real time. So it's not just numbers uh in a in a post somewhere or on a flyer or something like that. They got to see it in action and see it work right before their eyes. So uh CN is believing, you know, and that's kind of why we wanted to have the demonstration in the first place. So again, phenomenal results where you had high hydrocarbon TPH levels ranging from 16,000 to 20,000, and immediately after that treatment. Oh, I I hadn't gone into the post-treatment results yet, but so so let's talk about the phenomenal results, the post-treatment results. So section one for TPH hydrocarbons, section one again had 20,000 ppm. Post-treatment had 1,100 ppm. Section two had 16,000 ppm, post-treatment had 875 ppm. Section three, which had 19,000 ppm, post-treatment had 1,100 ppm. So those are all hovering 1,100 in in section one and section three, and 875 in section two, those are all hovering about 1,000 ppm. So we went from 16,000, uh ranging from 16,000 to 20,000 down to 1,000 ppm. Remember the threshold of interest is 10,000 ppm. So everybody saw this before their eyes. In section one went from 20,000 to 1100, section two went from 16,000 to 875, and section three went from 19,000 to 1,100. So again, that range there for TPH from section one, two, and three, the range starting pretreatment contamination level was sixteen thousand to twenty thousand. That's sixteen thousand, nineteen thousand, and twenty thousand. And post-treatment was eleven hundred, eleven hundred, and eight seventy-five. So the those three post-treatment at 1,100, 1100, 875. So let's just round it all and call it a thousand. So we went from you know the the range of 16 to 20,000 ppm in the three sections of TPH for total petroleum hydrocarbons, down to a thousand in all three sections uh by the same even treatment of eliminate. Now that one treatment at the same time also treated the chlorides. It's not like we did two different treatments for two different kinds of things. The eliminate product worked for both hydrocarbons and chlorides. Now let's talk about the the chlorides levels. Remember, in section one, uh chlorides were 7,500, and also in section three, 7,500, but section two was significantly high at 32,500. The same treatment that treated the hydrocarbons also took care of the chlorides. And the chlorides level in section one went from 7,500 down to 1800. In section two also 32,500 down to 1800, and in section three Also from 7,500 down to 1800. So remember the threshold of interest for chlorides is 3,000. And we started at 7,500 in two sections, and in one section, section two, had 32,500. Post-treatment, not only did we take care of all the hydrocarbons, we also took care of all the chlorides. All three sections were at 1800, which is significantly below the requirement of 3,000 ppm. So this small treatment, and it wasn't much used, this small treatment of by eliminate took care of the contamination level of the hydrocarbons and the chlorides at the same time. So think about this. If you're in the oil field and you have a production water spilled, you know the production water is high in chlorides, but as as well, uh let's say it hasn't gotten to the injection uh site yet or something like that, it's also going to be high in uh hydrocarbons as well. And or if your chlorides leak there on site, on your pad site, or something like that, where there's plenty of hydrocarbon contamination already, anyway. Um, you know, think about this. Using uh eliminate as a treatment solution, which is non-hazardous, non-toxic, it's a non-corrosive, all this, it's it's like the two-for-one deal. You're taking core care of your contamination levels for both hydrocarbons and chlorides at the same time. So in this particular demonstration, we did, again, the pretreatment contamination level for uh the three sections was 20,000, 16,000, and 19,000, immediately reduced down to 1100, 875, and 1,100. So the threshold of interest is 10,000. So that one small treatment took care of all the petroleum hydrocarbons. At the same time, the chloride contamination in section one was 7,500, in section two, 32,500, section three, 7,500. So this again, the same same amount in sections one and two at 7,500, but section three, I mean section section one and section three at 7,500, but section two was significantly higher at 32,500. Small treatment eliminate, the same eliminate that took care of the petroleum hydrocarbons, also took care of the chlorides. The chlorides level from 7,500 down to 1800, from 32,500 down to 1800, from 7,500 down to 1,800. All three across the board were reduced to 1,800, 1,800 ppm chlorides in the soil where the threshold is 3,000. So you're underneath the threshold all across the board, and you took care of it when one particular section was so high at 32,500, and the other two were at 7,500, 77,500 each, and you took care of all of them at the same time. So that small treatment of eliminate was very, very successful in taking care of the petroleum hydrocarbons and the chloride contamination all at the same time. And it didn't take much. Uh it's funny, you Randy likes to say, you know, I can have I can get there, have it treated, and uh, you know, be be leaving before you unload your excavator. And it's true because all this stuff happened in so fast, you know, it's it's quick and easy. You just gotta get the solution out there and you gotta create the contact, and boom, the contamination is done because it happens on contact. So again, in summary, those results were for hydrocarbons, the threshold of interest is 1% or 10,000 parts per million. All three samples had pre-uh treatment hydrocarbon contamination levels ranging from 16,000 to 20,000 ppm, and post-remediation by the application of eliminate uh had uh uh results ranging from 900 to 1100 ppm, so just call it a thousand across all three sections. So from 16 to 20,000 ppm pre-treatment down to 1,000 ppm post-treatment in all three sections across the board. Likewise, at the same time, the chlorides were also remediated where the threshold of interest is 3,000 ppm and all three samples had pre-treatment chlorides contamination ranging from 7,500 to 32,500, and all three post-treatment, the results were dropped or reduced down to 1800 ppm, significantly below the 3,000 threshold ppm. So the small treatment of eliminate took care of both the petroleum hydrocarbons and the chlorides at the same time. So that's uh those are the results from our uh very successful demonstration there in um in Odessa. Uh, we want to thank Lighthouse Environmental for having us uh and hosting us there. Uh thank you, uh Talon LPE for uh attending the demonstration and your interest level. Um thank you to our uh our couple, our emergency responders that were uh in town from Minnesota that uh uh came they they were in town from Minnesota at a conference uh for uh emergency response in San Antonio and made the the track over to Odessa. They drove over uh specifically just to you know they wanted to see in action uh this solution, even though they've been using it uh in the emergency response space. They wanted to see it in person, uh, performed by us, the manufacturers, um, Hambi Environmental and OMG solutions. So uh thank you to the Maloneys for traveling uh and making the track. And uh, you know, um we we are going to be continuing to do these type of uh demonstrations. If you have an interest in seeing something like this, just let us know. We um we will continue to do these types of live demonstrations. Um most of the time, uh, if it's a conference-oriented, we'll probably do the tabletop demonstration. But uh if if you've got a yard and you got a um uh a contamination site or something like that, and you want us to do it in person, just let us know. We'd be happy to come show you. Uh with that, uh, thank you, Hambi Environmental, for supporting this podcast, Let's Talk Remediation. Uh, thank you for tuning in in your interest level. Thank you, OMG Solutions, uh, and uh Lighthouse Environmental for hosting us. And um with that, that will conclude our 61st episode of Let's Talk Remediation, where we're trying to have a positive impact on the environmental industry, environmental remediation industry. And with that, I'm your host, Charles Fader, and I'm out of the way.
.jpg)