Hydrocarbon Management

Having a mine site located on a national monument requires careful management in every aspect. Hydrocarbon management is especially crucial at Greens Creek. I was involved in an exploratory project to determine how we can improve our current setup.

We were dealing with numerous storage tanks. Tanks full of diesel, glycol, jet engine lube, other types of lube, etc.... There are two other factors which affected this project: Lack of space and Greens Creek.

We didn't have the ability to take out a few trees and build a fuel farm. Anything aside from a major change in building layout would require our containment options to be implemented in the current location of the tanks.

Greens Creek runs right along the road (the tanks are placed right near the road on the opposite side of the river). Any sort of containment options we discussed had to avoid disturbing the current draining systems of rain water into the river.

I had to learn a lot about what hydrocarbon management really is, what the regulations are, and how we could implement it in our existing layout. It takes a lot of creativity when you are working with limited (and valuable) space. Everyone had their nook for which to store things and they didn't want that to change. All in all we came up with a few short and long term options.

For the most part mobile units were the most feasible option for our situation. Unfortunately I wasn't able to stay and see how things panned out.