Quantification of Land Contamination Due to Disposal of Produced Water in Effluent Pits Associated With Crude Oil in Kuwait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Effluent Pits are disposal pits in which produced water, originating from the initial separation of oil and gas is left to evaporate. The pits were typically constructed as a large earth bund and are usually lined with HDPE sheets to prevent lateral and vertical migration of pollutants. The Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) had set out a program to inject produced water into deep disposal wells after treatment and not dispose to effluent pits. Thirty-nine (39) out of Fifty-five (55) effluent pits that exist across the KOC assets were selected for decommissioning and remediation. The balance pits were kept for the purpose of emergency operational requirement. An intrusive investigation were undertaken on a representative number of de-commissioned pits to assess the vertical and lateral penetration of contamination in order to understand the remedial requirements and to restore the pits to the background concentration levels. Samples were collected at multiple points and depths within the each pit. A total of 56 soil samples (14 samples per pit) were drawn from four evaporation pits spread across company fields. The samples were analyzed for the "Standard Suite" of Contaminants of Concern (COCs) such as Petroleum Hydrocarbons, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, BTEX(Benzene, Toluene, Ethyl Benzene and Xylene), Heavy Metals and other inorganic compounds. The chemical testing had identified limited exceedances of the company's industrial RBCLs (Risk Based Clean-up Levels). However, it had identified widespread exceedances of the ecotoxicological RBCLs (Canadian regulation) across all locations for the main hydrocarbon fractions (TPH-DRO >C10 – C16 and TPH-RRO> C16-C35). Ecotoxicity failures were also frequently noted for heavy metals, PAHs and benzene. Despite the exceedances of these ecotoxicity screening criteria, direct evidence of phytotoxic effects on the flora and fauna within the oilfields was not noted. The results showed a mixed pattern of potential risks. The presence and depth of low permeability layers such as gatch coupled with artificial liners of HDPE appeared to have an important controlling factor in the extent of vertical and lateral migration of contamination. The assessment concluded predicting lower risks to industrial workers, moderate risk to groundwater and moderate/high impacts on ecology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".