PetroFix Design Assistant Tutorial

Let me explain how the site and areas are broken up. Imagine, if you will, you have a gas station that you have an underground storage tank in one spot and maybe a tank island in the other and they have different levels of contamination around them. What you should think about doing is breaking up your site that you’re trying to treat into separate areas. The design assistant allows you to build a site design anywhere from one to five areas that you can add based on the contaminant levels on the site and areas requiring the application of more or less PetroFix. As an example, you can add concentration data that maybe you get from a monitoring well on the site in a particular area and add those separately.

So now let’s label our new area. We’ll call this one Area 1. You have the size, which would be the square footage of the area or the footprint of the area and then the vertical treatment interval field which is the depth that you’re treating. For this field, we have a top where it asks you for a top and bottom treatment interval. Below ground surface is BGS. Let’s say our treatment starts at 12 feet and maybe you want to go just a little bit above where the groundwater normally resides. And then for the bottom, you go to the bottom of whatever zone you think your contaminant is sitting. Let’s go 12 to maybe 22. Based on top and bottom inputs, we get a treatment zone thickness of 10 feet.

You’re now asked about NAPL. This stands for Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid. If you have no NAPL present, you just click no. But if NAPL is present, then you’re prompted by two different questions. The first choice is you have above half an inch. So this is quite a lot and we wouldn’t recommend PetroFix treatment of any contaminated site if you’ve got that much Free Phase or NAPL present. The next option is if you have a sheen. Here, we prompt you that this may not be the right option yet. You might first consider a chemical oxidation step before PetroFix would be applied. Chemical oxidation would bring some of the contamination concentrations down to a reasonable level that you can then treat with an injectable carbon product. If there is a sheen present and you still feel comfortable proceeding, you should choose yes and then move forward with the design.

Next, we have a soil grain size selection. The categories are pretty general and as an example, you would choose coarse if it’s really dominated by sands and gravel. Fines would be where you have 75% or maybe 50% or more of a lot of fines in the area that the contaminants are and that they’re transported through. And then, the more mixed version of the two of those. And finally, bedrock is your fourth option.

Now, let’s move forward with our site design. After selecting your soil grain size, hit next. You’ll now enter your groundwater contaminant concentrations. Again, this is whatever your groundwater data is telling you from the monitoring well in the area of the zone. Go ahead and input your data for each contaminant found. We have your typical contaminants listed here that you may find on a petroleum site and if you scroll down, you’ll see that there’s also TPH or total petroleum hydrocarbon, gasoline range, GRO, and also DRO. Those are options you can enter as well. Once you’re finished filling in your contaminant concentrations, hit next or submit. It should now show you how much PetroFix you’ll need to treat that size of an area based on how contaminated it is.

The second part to determining the amount of product needed, and in a lot of ways equally important, is determining how you’ll perform the injection to PetroFix. It’s good to know that we’ve designed PetroFix Design Assistant to provide a design based on the same design parameters REGENESIS uses for all out applications. These same principles are incorporated into our Design Assistant’s online calculator to help you determine how you should inject PetroFix. The key points here are the number of injection points needed and the total volume that you should be putting into the ground on your site. You probably have a mix tank on-site so you’ll need to put in the volume of your mix tank here. In this case, I’ll say 300 gallons.

The point spacing and the dilution factor are what control the number of points you have to inject and how much total volume you will be injecting. For the best result, you want to have reasonable point spacing. If your points are spaced too far away, then you’re not going to get good coverage of PetroFix. To help you, we’ve got warnings built into the program, based on what soil type you choose so the Design Assistant will warn you if you’re going over what we think is reasonable injection point spacing. In principle, you could inject on any point spacing you want and if you put enough volume in the ground, you would be able to fill the pores with PetroFix. But we find that the transport is limited with PetroFix so you should really stick to the recommended spacing as closely as possible. The dilution factor is set so that you’re filling an effective pore volume of the soil that we think is adequate for coverage of the products in the subsurface so that you really have a true treatment of your contaminated site. If you get outside of what we would recommend, you can always revert back to the recommended values. That just brings you back to the values that we would start with and you can then adjust as you gain more experience using PetroFix as a product.

Once you’ve got your application details worked out, now you can go here to do this, print or save PDF for your area. If you select print or save PDF, it’ll bring up a document that you can either save as a PDF or print. We’ve tried to make this document helpful in two ways, one, something that you could include in a work plan to hand to whoever has to approve this treatment, and also something that would be useful to give to a driller or whosever on-site and is going to perform the application. The document includes information like the amount of product, your tank volume, and then how much PetroFix versus mixed water you would put into a tank, and a summary of the groundwater concentrations that you had reported on that area.

When you’re ready to order PetroFix, go back to the site that you had selected. You’ll see the button start order process and click here. You’ll now be walked through the order process, which is pretty straightforward. One thing I’ll point out is the question about which electron acceptor blend you wish to use, which comes second in the order process. Your options are nitrate/sulfate blend, which is what we recommend to have the best results, but if you’re in an area where you can’t use nitrate or for whatever reason you don’t want to and you’re close to a sensitive receptor water body and you don’t want to use nitrates, then you have the option to use sulfates only. Make your selection here. If you had multiple areas within this site that you were ordering for, all of them would be selected nitrate or sulfate only in this selection. Click next and continue the order process.

You will need to confirm details on how the product will be delivered, who will be receiving it, that’s something quite important. Make sure to also provide an on-site contact. REGENESIS will still contact you regarding your order before anything is shipped to confirm any details but as many details as you can confirm ahead of time helps. Next, click to accept the terms and conditions. And, you’re done. You can also contact us at different points and type us a message if you have a question at any point in the process where you see one of these boxes. We also have resources available here that are meant to be a useful guide in terms of best practices and also provide more about the theory and background of the technology.

Here’s some additional features offered with the PetroFix Design Assistant. You’ve got profile information. You can archive your sites in order to keep your Sites tab looking up-to-date and really, just reflective of the sites that you may have currently in operation. Now, you can keep your active ones here and then archive any you’re finished with. You can also check out your orders that you’ve placed. To do this, click on the Order ID and you can gather more information on what you ordered and the billing and shipping details, as well as the product amounts ordered for particular areas.

That completes our tutorial for the PetroFix Design Assistant. Thank you for considering PetroFix as your remedial solution for your site and we look forward to hearing from you.