I was not aware that oil wells produce ozone.
Where does this ozone come from?
Ozone is a byproduct of the oxidation of volatile organics in the lower atmosphere. It can also be created via combustion such as a flare stack at a sour gas well. Also every diesel engine produces ozone via combustion at high temperatures along with NOx emissions which when in contact with atmospheric O2 also reduce it to monoatomic oxygen which finds another O2 in short order becoming O3 which is ozone. Every drill rig is powered by diesel engines as is every frac job. It’s truly impressive to see 15+ ship sized diesel engines on semi trailers powering pumps that put out 15,000+ psi each all feeding into a 8” pipe the amounts of energy is awe inspiring. When people need to find a grad job and GPS is only getting you to within a mile or so before you have to go off road we just tell people look to the horizon find the huge plume of black smoke pouring into the sky and there is your frac site those engines put up a smoke cloud that would make the most ardent coal roller truck guy blush. It’s the nature of the industry. Non attainment means every one of those engines has to have SCR catalysts for NOx and particulates emissions plus the urea injection to regen those cats. It’s hideously expensive.
Thanks. I live far from any oil producing areas and never visited any, so it’s hard to envision. Now that you mention it, I suppose it’s not possible for an oil well to be a closed system and all those volatiles have to go somewhere.
I’ve done a bit of lab analyses of VOCs way back when, but I was in the nuclear field.