Evanston Wyoming hydrogen sulfide gas field operations

This was one that Caroline Joseph, who took this class a couple years ago, brought back from a summer where she worked at Exxon — I think it was Exxon. She was down in Houston with an oil company, and somewhere they discovered oil but it was, I believe, sour oil. What's sour oil? Sour gas means it has hydrogen sulfide in it. Hydrogen sulfide is toxic. It numbs the nerves in the nose. It puts your nose to sleep and you just die from hydrogen sulfide poisoning. In the southwest corner of Wyoming, you go through this rangeland, they'll have signs saying H2S — they have fourteen percent H2S in the gas in the ground there. And the cows have to be very careful about what they breathe, because some of it leaks up through the ground after they drilled all these holes.

Tom's visit to the sour-gas dome at Evanston, including the "Danger, toxic gases" roadside signs and the two competing approaches (Chevron heated sulfur pipeline vs. Amoco's 10-mile sulfur-trucking road) to handling the H2S byproduct. Sets up sulfide stress corrosion cracking as a hydrogen-cracking variant.

Now I had never been through Evanston, Wyoming. Anyone from Wyoming? Almost no one's from Wyoming — it's the least populated state in the country. Evanston is just sort of at the corner. Utah's got this funny shape and it's got a little notch cut out of it. That's Evanston, right there in the notch, but it's on the Wyoming side. It's a ranching area, there's lots of cows. You drive through the cow area of Evanston — in fact I had to wait for a cow to cross the road. There's no fences there, they just kind of wander anywhere. But you also see these signs as you're driving through this tumbleweed-type area — it's not exactly tumbleweeds, it's rolling hills, but they don't have trees, they've got little scrubs of grass which I guess the cows have to eat — anyway, it says, "Danger, toxic gases."