47. 



pores. Of course, the injection of liquids in the ground is quite com- 

 mon and one of the practices that is quite essential in oil work is to 

 put up a plant so that the water is chemically treated in advance of in- 

 jection. However, in the disposal of brines from oil wells, the whole 

 object is to get the stuff in the ground. One of the most recent devel- 

 opments in underground mechanics is the deliberate fracturing of rocks 

 by pressure and the injection of sand in the fractures to hold them 

 open. Instead of having just the well bore, you have perhaps hundreds 

 of square feet of exposed surface. Plugged pores can be dealth with 

 by using enough pressure in a properly designed and executed maneuver 

 to give controlled fracturing. Would it be necessary to reprocess the 

 waste fluids to remove the constituents that might subsequently precip- 

 itate on contact with the rock material to form plugs in the pores? 



I think we have to dilute the materials enough to avoid forming 

 "hot spots." To obtain dilution and at the same time keep the density 

 high, we can use natural brines. If the waste is placed in the bottom 

 of the basin, diluted to disperse the hot stuff, and the density is kept 

 higher than the surrounding water, we then have mechanical stability. 



CHAIRMAN HESS: Would you like to make a comment, Dr. 

 Culler? 



DR. CULLER: It is going to be difficult to define a typical kind 

 of waste. The kind of waste you get is high in aluminum nitrate, or 

 in neutralized aluminum nitrate and contains as much as 40 per cent 

 by weight of dissolved solids. Certain conditions in the rock might 

 precipitate the aluminum nitrate as a heavy sludge and plug up the bore 

 hole. If you dissolve stainless steel in nitric acid and inject it into an 

 alkaline layer, the bed will plug with ferrous oxide, which would be 

 hard to unplug. However, I suspect the chemical processing people 

 could remove certain materials or the conditions of the systems ad- 

 justed so the waste could be injected. It is a matter of deciding where 

 the material is to be injected, what the conditions are, and what would 

 be detrimental to the process, and then having the solutions prepared 

 to fit the requirements . 



It is really difficult. Precipitation will be ?. problem. Heat 

 will be a problem. It might be necessary to cool for periods of three 

 or four years, especially in the case of wastes from the processing 

 of stainless steel which otherwise would require very expensive neu- 

 tralization. If there is concentration along restricted bands in the 

 rock or soil the heat concentration might be very serious; montmoril- 

 lonite clay may act as a trap and prevent distribution. Removal of 



